Translating a Web-based Work of Digital Literature into Several Languages: Issues and Feedback

Abstract

In 2010, the digital literature piece Déprise was published online (http://deprise.fr or http://lossofgrasp.com). Progressively, this web-based interactive narrative has been translated from French into English (2010), Italian (2011), Spanish (2013), and Portuguese (2016), and more recently in Arabic, Chinese, German, Hungarian and Polish (2020). Every translation has led to an intercultural and transcreative process [14] between the translators and the author. In this paper, we explore the following question: what does the translation of a web-based piece teach us about digital literature, but also about the Digital and the Web itself? We have asked the English, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese translators of the work for feedback on the translation process. We have used the written exchanges with the translators to question the modes of collaboration between author and translator and the importance of translating specific dimensions of web-based digital literature. Additionally, we briefly discuss some future research trajectories on translating web-based digital literature: role of indirect translation [11], cultural dimension of the works, and translation as reinvented memory.