La « Loi 101 » et la langue du théâtre québécois : implications pour la traduction

Abstract

Ensuring unilingual French in Quebec, “Bill 101” also makes an impact on the culture and theatre therein. The use of the sociolect of the Montreal working class (commonly called “joual”) thus ceases to be the flagship issue of any artistic or literature production of the Province. However, the language of plays created after the “Les Belles-Soeurs” of Michel Tremblay does not lose its identification value, demonstrated by the presence of specific elements of the Quebec French language. Nevertheless, these Quebecisms constitute the main difficulty when translating Quebec plays into foreign languages and for their adaptation into other francophone theaters. Starting from a sociolinguistic perspective, the purpose of this contribution is to improve the understanding of the challenge raised when translating/adapting texts written in “joual”. Selected texts include the above mentioned work and later plays – to take only the most representative examples – “Albertine en cinq tems” of the same author, and “Les Muses orphelines” by Michel Marc Bouchard. This author analyzes selected French and Spanish-speaking versions of these texts with the aim to compare and contrast differences between the translations and the Quebecian originals.