Bénédicte Coste

Title: “Proposal: The ‘Décabase’, a database of translations in periodicals”

Abstract:

Our two-person talk (Bénédicte Coste, lecturer in Victorian studies and Caroline Crépiat, research engineer, Lille) aims to introduce the “Décabase”, a database of translations from English to French taken from ten periodicals dating from the late 19th Century. This database builds on the “Intraduction” project, a database created by Blaise Wilfert-Portal and Sabine Juratic (http://intraduction.huma-num.fr) which brings together literary translations into French selected following a detailed review of the Catalogue Générale de la Librairie Française, a catalogue of works published in French between 1840 and 1915.

The more modestly-sized “Décabase” highlights the presence of poetic, fragmentary translations in a selection of literary magazines, from the most cosmopolitan to the most nationalist, between 1880 and 1915. Our main objective is to provide a useful tool for researchers, translation studies scholars, historians, translators and specialists in periodicals. Working on a smaller scale, the Décabase situates the fragment in the “translation” category generally reserved to longer texts, thereby questioning ideas of canonicity, literary history and translation quality. It is oriented towards periodical literature, fragments, and translators, well-known or otherwise, without attempting to evaluate the quality of the translation. Working with the materiality of medium, content and the knowledge worker, the “Décabase” is also the result of a translation of the categories put in place by researchers in humanities and social sciences into a language which is can be understood and used by technological tools.

Biographie:

Bénédicte Coste teaches Victorian literature and culture at the Université de Bourgogne, France. She mainly works on British Decadent writers (Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons) whose reception and presence in French letters she explores. She has translated Pater’s The Renaissance and other essays into French, along with other writings by Arthur Symons, Vernon Lee, John and Addington Symonds. With Dr Caroline Crépiat, she is preparing the ‘Décabase’ a database of translation of Decadent poets in a selection of French periodicals between 1880 and 1914.