“Great escapes”: Pseudo-historical romance offers its reader an escapist romantic fantasy in which love brings the action to a climax. The narrative creates and develops settings that must literally capture the readers’ imagination as they are reading the novel. In translating these stories into French, maintaining a precise territorial context guarantees the exoticism of the place of narration, totally unrelated to the familiar universe of the French readers. Instead of a strategy that adapts the text to the real world and to the local standards, translating romance novels into French implies the representation of an unfailing exoticism. By studying a corpus of works that we translated for a French publisher, I will show how re-writing the text is part of an identification process of the reader with the female heroine of the novel and how the translation process must sustain – and even reinforce – the fantasies that thread the narrative.
Here's a version of the abstract in English: