Grammatical aspect and its expression in French translations of Bulgarian literary texts
This dissertation is a reflection on the linguistic and ethical issues at play in translation, hinging on an examination of the temporal and aspectual values in the French and Bulgarian languages. The question of aspect in Bulgarian is approached through the study of its possible translations in French. The orientations of this work go along the belief that translation plays a crucial role in the understanding of the mechanisms underlying the functioning of languages. The theoretical approach of this dissertation made it necessary to describe the following temporal paradigms: the aorist and perfect in Bulgarian, the "passé simple", "imparfait" and "passé composé" in French. It also considers and illustrates some orthonymic devices so as to underline the importance of the referential experience in the craft of writing a translation, and also to highlight the omnipresence, in the translator's mind, of a conception of what is natural and appropriate to say in a given language. Going through the notions of tense and aspect made it possible to shed light on the handling of the secondary imperfective forms, which proves to be essential for the comprehension of aspect. Moreover, even though the original text and the translation give different perspectives on the action, preferring one interpretation or the other does not obstruct the reader's understanding. These divergences prove that the existence of aspectual oppositions in Bulgarian are hardly ever taken into account when translated. The examination of the perfect led to the broadening of our study to the analysis of meditative values, the expression of which, in Bulgarian, is strongly integrated in the morphology of the verbs.