Traduire un texte entre les langues. Retour sur l’expérience de traduction de 'Hong bai hei'

The aim of this paper is to investigate the strategy adopted for the conservation and recreation of heterogeneous elements in the Italian translation of Hong bai hei (“The Red, the White and the Black”) by the Chinese-Canadian author Chen He. Upon its first publication in 2007, the novel was praised as an example of powerfully “global” writing: as a matter of fact, it is characterized by a high degree of heterogeneity at the level of themes, settings, languages, genres, and sources. In the translation process, this plurality of elements naturally calls for a minoritizing strategy aiming to reproduce, to the highest possible extent, the intrinsic heterogeneity of the original. However, the translator also carried out a strategy that points to the recreation of the original text: it took the form of a deliberate insertion of heterolinguistic elements, as well as an interaction with the author in order to recreate specific passages of the novel. In the final analysis, such a creative and “globalizing” strategy helps redefine the original text and highlight its heterogeneous and global nature.