Le Nègre Reconnaissant (1814): A Translemic Analysis of Maria Edgeworth´s The Grateful Negro into French.

Abstract

Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) was one of the most popular authors in pre-victorian Britain. Gender studies have recently drawn attention to her oeuvre since she cultivated different genres and translations of her works into several languages proliferated on the Continent throughout the nineteenth century. My goal is to provide a translemic analysis of “Le nègre reconnaisant” (1814), a translation of one of the stories composing Popular Tales (1804) within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and Itamar Even-Zohar’s theory of literary polysystems. After a contextualization of this author and the particular tale, we will concentrate on the main features of the target text before focusing on the changes and transformations with respect to the original.