Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Creating and Translating Lexicon Mutations

Résumé En

Science fiction literature can be a language laboratory: the same way science fiction stories stage technological innovations, scientific developments, society evolution, they also question the mutations of language. In his book, Cloud Atlas (2004), David Mitchell offers the readers a journey through time where all the characters are linked in one way or another through destiny and reincarnation, from the nineteenth century to a distant future. He chose to paint two periods in the future: “An Orison of Sonmi-451”, located in a relatively distant future in Korea and “Sloosha's Crossin' an' Evrythin' After”, located in Hawaii in a very distant future where the world and humanity have undergone an apocalyptic catastrophe. As other science fiction authors before him (Orwell, Hoban, Burgess), Mitchell uses language changes to highlight society mutations. Thus, in both futures, the readers face linguistic defamiliarizing which is explained by the mutations of human societies. The first is a society derived from corporate culture, a very capitalistic world with advanced technologies and clear human hierarchy in which language reflects the way of thinking but is not grammatically different from modern English. The second shows a humanity closer to Nature, surviving through farming and enduring cannibal attacks, this period also stages a dialectal English which can be rather difficult to understand for the readers. Thanks to terminology and lexicology approaches, this proposal offers to analyse and understand the new terms of Mitchell’s future periods in order to highlight how the future lexicon is created and used in the novel. Furthermore, if invented terms are a common feature in science fiction, their translation is always a question mark. Using contrastive linguistics and translation studies approaches, this proposal also offers to consider the French translation of the future of the lexicon offered by Mitchell, considering both their use as defamiliarizing objects and world-building tools.