Theory and practice in the French discourse of translation

Résumé En

Translation theory has always been intimately connected to practice. For centuries, it was mostly elaborated by translators and was always prescriptive, that is, aiming at defining the conditions for "good" translating. Actually, while it would be tempting to take the emergence of "descriptive translation studies"-to mention Gideon Toury's (1995) most celebrated contribution to the field-as the birthmark of the study of translation as an autonomous discipline, one could argue that translation studies remain till now dependent on prescription in many ways, as remarks Lawrence Venuti (2000: 4). We find within the field of translation studies a much larger proportion of active translators than, say, the proportion of creative writers within the field of literary studies. All this points to the dependent, subaltern status of the translated text, and-without delving further into the philosophical and ethical implications of this question-provides me with a good starting point. I would like for this contribution to be a reflection on the link between theory and practice in translation, based on my own, three-decade long experience as a translator, a translation editor, and a scholar in translation studies. It has been a very particular experience, because it relies on translation to and from Arabic, and one that has often led me to elaborate a discourse on translation opposite to the mainstream one, whether in France (or, more generally, in the "global North") or in the Arab world. In order to explain this, I shall have to dwell on my personal trajectory in some detail, and I will do so not out of self-indulgence, but rather as a way of understanding, through a self socio-analysis of sorts, the objective conditions that made this trajectory possible. While doing so, I hope that I will provide the reader with some useful insights on the recent history of the French Orientalist academic field and French-Arab cultural relations as well.