4. Translating the French in the French Translations of Jane Eyre

Abstract

Following the concepts and theories developed by translation and reception specialists, this essay combines literary, linguistic, and translatological approaches in a study five French translators’ responses to Brontë’s use of French in Jane Eyre. Translation within the novel is presented as both necessary (for the English-speaking readership) and impossible in order to preserve the ‘effet de réel’, and also for cultural, ideological, and ontological reasons. However, Brontë’s pedagogical approach to textual deciphering is not translated into the French versions of her work, so that French readers are not educated into reading and producing textual meaning. Her vision of a multiple language system viewed as a continuum, her dream of freeing languages, that is Jane Eyre’s literary agenda, ends up lost in translation.