Traduction de termes textiles français en suédois : - traduction d’un extrait du livre Textiles techniques et fonctionnels, matériaux du XXIe siècle

Sammanfattning: In this essay, the domains of translation studies and technical textiles are brought together. A section of the French book Textiles techniques et fonctionnels, matériaux du XXIe siècle is translated into Swedish. The different translation procedures are presented, as well as particular difficulties which might occur during the translation process. The study also treats the field of terminology and various relations between terms. All textile terms are extracted from the translated text and a bilingual glossary is created. The essays secondary purpose is to simulate a publication of the book in Sweden and to examine if any adjustments are made to the translated text specifically because of this. During the translation, a large number of borrowed words were found. Both the French and the Swedish text contain several Anglicisms. The Swedish text contains a number of fashion related words which originates from France and the French text contains similar words which are borrowed from Italy. Both France and Italy are important countries within the fashion industry. Several words of German origin were also found in the Swedish text. The names of the synthetic fibers are often derived from the chemical composition of the material and the names are highly standardized in different languages. Translation procedures such as adaptation, transposition, modulation, equivalence and explication are used to adjust the Swedish text, for the purpose of obtaining an idiomatic language. Some reoccurring elements were detected, such as the prefix anti- in French and the suffix  -kläder in Swedish. A few « false friends » and ellipses where also found. When studying the terms, a number of hyponyms and a few antonyms were found, as well as a group of words with temporal relations. Both the Swedish and the French text contains some quasi-synonyms and a few terminology variations. Several cases of eponyms were found, most of them are trademarks of different materials which has developed into generic names (i.e. nylon, lycra, gore-tex). The translated text is a scientific text of denotational character and the translation did not pose any major difficulty. Though it is of great importance that the translator is aware of the different ranges of meaning implied in both the source and the target languages. Three adjustments were made due to the fictitious publication in Sweden ; one generalization of geographical character, one explication of a French textile brand and one cultural adjustment. The most recent Swedish-French textile dictionary we found is the Swedish standard TNC 76, which was latest updated in 1981. By consequence, it does not contain recent textile words such as for example microfiber. A palpable difficulty when translating textile texts is to determine whether a material is a trademark or a generic name. If the material has started a development towards becoming an eponym, it can be difficult to determine if the brand name is referred to, or the material in a more general meaning. Several questions arouse regarding this issue. How do the companies who own trademarks act to protect their brands and is this transformation even possible to prevent? What are the consequences of a genericized trademark? This would be a very interesting subject to investigate further.