This Master in Translation thesis discusses Boris Pahor’s novel The Villa by the Lake (Vila ob jezeru) and its Italian and French translations. Based on a corpus made up of extracts from the source text and its two translations, we have chosen four linguistic categories concerning the most recurrent features of the author’s style: (1) the realia, better known as culture-specific elements, (2) dialect and colloquial expressions, (3) footnotes as well as (4) toponyms and proper names. Since this is a contemporary Slovenian novel, which has been translated into French through Italian (we are talking about an indirect or relay translation), this thesis will therefore analyze the relationship between the author and the translator: despite its importance and its recurrence, this subject is still not fully explored nowadays. The purpose of this thesis is to show the main translation procedures that can be used to solve dilemmas associated with the translation of two different cultures and to discover the divergences between the source text and its indirect translation. In the theoretical part, we introduce the author and the historical and socio-political context in which Pahor writes in his novels; then, we briefly present the two translators, the author’s style, the norm in literary translation, the notion of indirect translation, as well as the translation strategies and procedures for the four categories chosen. In the empirical part, we compare extracts from the source text with their respective translations, taking into consideration the four categories mentioned above. In the conclusion, we confirm four hypotheses and refuse two of them.
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