La Tierce main: Le discours rapporté dans les traductions françaises de Fielding au XVIIIe siècle (review)

Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov lectures in translation practice and theory at the University of Helsinki and has herself translated a number of eighteenth-century French texts into Finnish. This book, adapted from her doctoral dissertation defended in 2003, is a detailed and stimulating reading of French translations of Henry Fielding's novels in the long eighteenth century. She takes a multidisciplinary approach, combining modern translation theory, linguistics, and philology to examine the hypothesis that translation is in itself a form of indirect speech, in which the translator performs the role of rapporteur.

The work is divided into three parts. The first is a theoretical study, beginning with an examination of three notions fundamental to translation studies—the polysystem, manipulation, and translational norms—before moving on to a study of modes of classification of indirect speech and how translation can function as a mode of indirect speech. The second part is a historical study of the corpus, the translators, and the reception of their work, while the third is a detailed analysis of the presence of various modes of indirect speech in the translations. The book also contains a glossary and a series of tables presenting the results of the analysis in a form that allows for at-a-glance comparison (although, in purely practical terms, these are less clear than they could be, making it rather difficult to distinguish between the results for La Place and Puisieux, for example).

The first part is devoted to laying the theoretical underpinning for the study. It is a clear and lucid presentation of current translation theories espoused by scholars such as Gideon Toury and Theo Hermans. However, it is essentially recapitulative, and one is tempted to question whether a briefer exposition might not have been more in keeping with the overall historico-descriptive approach. The section devoted to theories of indirect speech similarly demonstrates Taivalkoski-Shilov's talent for clear didactic exposition. She discusses theories of indirect speech—Marguerite Lips's syntactical analysis, Brian McHale's theory of mimesis and diegesis, and G.N. Leech and M.H. Short's typology of narrative reports of speech acts—which she usefully synthesizes in her own typology. This is presented as a continuum depending on the degree of control wielded by the narrator over the characters' speech, ranging from résumé paraliptique (total control by the narrator) to discours direct libre (absence of control by the narrator). As a minor quibble, I cannot be the only reader to find the use of acronyms to designate the various types of indirect speech confusing: I kept reading rp as "received pronunciation," DDL as DDT, and DIM as a French brand of undergarments.

This thorough exposition prepares the way for the more substantial, historical part of the study, which demonstrates the same qualities as the earlier chapters. Taivalkoski-Shilov's descriptions of the translations and their translators are systematic and limpid; she has clearly devoted a great deal of time to seeking out hard-to-find bibliographical and biographical data, providing a valuable service for future researchers interested in the reception of literary translations in the eighteenth century. One issue to which the author fails to accord sufficient importance, however, is the question of how much control literary translators had over their translations once they had handed in their work for publication. Although she addresses this issue in passing, stating that she has used the first edition where possible to "éliminer autant que possible les traces d'autres personnes que le traducteur" (186–87), she presents little or no investigation of the impact of editorial changes to the translator's manuscript. Using the translation of types of indirect speech as evidence of a particular translation strategy, as Taivalkoski-Shilov does, presumes that there is no external intervention in the translator's text once it is in the publisher's...