Stylistic Problems of Translation : Some Italian Translations of Bouvard et Pécuchet

Abstract

In light of the notion of orthonymy, as defined by Jean-Claude Chevalier and Marie-France Delport in L’Horlogerie de saint Jérôme (1995) and Jérômiade (2010), the transposition of two Flaubertian style features in a few Italian translations of Bouvard et Pécuchet are considered in this article, namely the sub-paragraph partition and sentence pattern relative to conjunctions and adverbs. It will be shown how a normative representation of the target language often influences the translator’s choices at the expense of the formal originality of the source text.