Ce en tour figé : qu’en faire en allemand ?

Abstract

The contribution looks at how to render into modern German some fixed expressions of French containing the pronoun ce – ce disant, ce faisant, pour ce faire, ce nonobstant, et ce – in order to examine whether the discursive differences between the two languages reveal anything about the functions of French ce in this use. It examines the procedures by which translators attempt to preserve the semantic content of communication in a corpus consisting of French-German translations of these sequences containing ce, based on five bilingual sub-corpora of one hundred occurrences of each of the expressions in texts of law and international conventions. Examination of the translations shows the false semantic transparency of these ce formulations, whether their meaning fade away in favour of authoritative factual descriptions or change in favour of an argumentative move.

Keywords

• french ce formulations
• french-german translation
• ce as an anaphorical pronoun
• ce as a conceptual reformulation
• ce as an argumentative shifter