Comment étudier les titres des oeuvres retraduites ? Remarques préliminaires

Résumé

This study addresses the issue of titles of retranslated works, seldom discussed in studies on retranslation. A corpus of titles of novels retranslated into French, Greek and Polish was subjected to a quantitative and qualitative analysis: firstly, to answer questions about the frequency of “re-titling” according to the language of translation, the number of successive translations of a work, the time of publication of the original work and of the translation(s); secondly, a comparative analysis of the successive titles of a work informs on the nature of the undergone changes. The study shows that “re-titling” is a phenomenon present in all three languages, but it has a random nature: it would be difficult to indicate a category of novels, a period or a type of title in which this practice would be more regular. Similarly, the ways of “re-titling” are common to all three languages, but their use is not systematic nor conditioned by specific factors. Apart from these findings, the article points to possible directions for research on retranslated titles from a translational and socioliterary perspective.