Lost in Syntax: Translating Voice in the Literary Essay

摘要

This article will focus on difficulties in translating voice in the literary essay. The corpus examined will be taken from works submitted for the Governor-General Award in translation (French to English) between 1990 and 1995. Reference will be made to differences in this essay as genre in English and French, as these differences affect the translation of narrative voice. The primary focus of the article, however, will be on syntactic structures(emphatic structures, word order, narrative subject positioning, etc.) More specifically, it will be shown that a failure to understand the importance of these structures to the meaning of the original text can result in infelicitous shifts in voice in the translated texts.