The present master's thesis focuses on the problem of translating metaphors, more specifically personifications, from Slovenian into French. We decided to analyse the autobiographical novel Necropolis by Boris Pahor because there are some specific factors (such as the presence of two cultures and his personal experience, as he is a concentration camp survivor) that, in our opinion, could represent an additional barrier to the process of translating personifications. We have established a corpus of 146 personifications from the Slovenian novel Nekropola (Necropolis) and its French translation Pèlerin parmi les ombres and we have then observed
which were the most common translation strategies. In our opinion one of the most important aspects when translating metaphors and personifications is to acknowledge that we are in fact transferring the world and culture of the source language into the world and culture of the target language. We must therefore recognize the cultural, experiential and linguistic peculiarities which, if appropriately understood and transferred into the target language and culture, will enable an accurate translation. We studied the views and strategies of eight linguists who focused on the problem of translating metaphors and we applied some of their strategies to analyse Andrée Lück-Gaye’s French translation of personifications that we found in Necropolis. We observed in which cases the translator used a specific strategy and we tried to find out if certain types of personifications privileged a specific translation strategy.
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