Dans le monde des « clodos », « clébards » et « cainfris ». La traduction de l’argot français dans Vernon Subutex de Virginie Despentes

Abstract

Slang , sometimes referred to as a social variation in language, can be a challenge for the translator due to its rapid evolution and lack of equivalences in the target language. This paper examine the translation of slang and the phenomenon of standardization through the Swedish translation of the French author Virginie Despentes’s novel Vernon Subutex 2 . The theoretical framework derives from the field of Descriptive Translation Studies ( DTS ) whose objective is to describe the tendencies that occur in a great number of translations (Toury, 2012 : 111). In order to determine the potential tendency towards standardization in the corpus, the translation solutions are classified into three categories : omission, maintenance and change . The analysis shows that the strategy of omission is frequently employed, which indicates that a part of the slang vocabulary in the French source text is represented by a more neutral or standard language in the Swedish target text. Consequently, a tendency towards standardization can be observed.