Valérie Bada, Céline Letawe, Christine Pagnoulle, Patricia Willson, eds. Impliciter, expliciter. L’intervention du traducteur. Liège, Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2018, 276 p.

Theories within translation studies range from the notion that everything is translatable to the notion that translation is impossible. In response to this ongoing debate, Impliciter, expliciter. L’intervention du traducteur provides a broad range of approaches to translation. Edited by Valérie Bada, Céline Letawe, Christine Pagnoulle, and Patricia Willson, the book sets out to survey the interventions made by translators to overcome the cultural obstacles in translation. By focusing on occurrences of explicitation and implicitation, it provides answers to questions like: Is the translator always tasked with rendering the original’s essential meaning? If the translator recreates the original in a new time and setting, why not assume that the resulting work has a different purpose? How can a divergence in perspective be traced through the words that are used? (p. 8). In the second theoretical chapter, Christiane Nord addresses the referential function of translation. Her central argument is that translators adapt the degree of explicitness of their texts according to the presupposed knowledge of the target readers. Translated texts, like other textual works, require a proper distribution between implied and explicit information. Explicitation is needed to clarify content that is assumed to be unknown to the target audience, whereas implicitation occurs when the target readers are already familiar with the reality described. This brings Nord to the conclusion that explicitation is appropriate for (linguistic, encyclopaedic, and pragmatic) presuppositions about the source culture or a third culture, and implicitation for (linguistic, encyclopaedic, and pragmatic) presuppositions about the target culture. The remaining chapters are organized around case studies, but they all revolve around the theoretical debate on explicitation and implicitation initiated by Hewson and Nord. The case studies are grouped according to the following areas: “artistic productions,” “economic and political challenges,” and “didactic reflections.” Four chapters focus on literary and cinematographic productions. In “Quand la théologie s’en mêle : première traduction française de Paradise Lost de John Milton,” Christophe Tournu provides a comparative analysis of this biblical epic and its first translation into French. As Tournu illustrates, Dupré de Saint-Maur’s version presents considerable discrepancies from the original text, which, contrary to what the translator himself claims in his preface, cannot be justified by the “génie différent des langues” (p. 59). Paradise Lost had in fact been adapted to the expectations of the Catholic target audience in order to ensure that the book contained nothing heretical. By ending with a comparison of Dupré de Saint-Maur’s translation and the second French translation made by Racine, Tournu finds a clever way to show how embedded a translation is in its context and to what degree translators practice self-censorship. In “Traduire l’écriture des confins chez Sapphire : entre trop-dit et non-dit,” Karen Bruneaud raises the hypothesis that the more complex a text is, the greater the temptation to make it more explicit (p. 87). In order to test this hypothesis, Bruneaud analyses Push, a novel about an illiterate Afro-American girl, which can be considered complex due to its provocative content, and its linguistic and stylistic peculiarities. Relying on Candace Séguinot’s classification, which distinguishes three degrees of explicitation (p. 87), Bruneaud shows that Push’s translator has resisted the urge to make the original discourse more accessible to the target audience. However, the choices made by the translator result in losses, such as the protagonist’s vernacular and her corresponding sociocultural identity. Sabrina Baldo de Brébisson, then, examines how translators proceed when they come across a term that has no equivalent. While the word “prefect” that has no lexical equivalent in French because of its rootedness in English society serves the purpose well, the “Étude d’un culturème intraduisible …