Flipping It Further: A Feminist Retranslation of 'Bonjour Tristesse' by Francoise Sagan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The feminist translation movement grew out of a hive of feminist activity in the 1970s and 1980s in France, the US and Canada. Women writers at this time pounced on the Derridean reassessment of the stability of meaning in language, a concept that placed the emphasis on subjective interpretation. A reimagining of language from a feminine perspective began. Through playful and unashamedly ostentatious invention and intervention the absurdities and limitations of a dominant patriarchal language were exposed and undermined. Feminist translators rose to the challenge presented by women's writing that was characterised by polysemy and neologisms. Translation strategies were appropriated to accomplish the task in a highly overt style. Meanwhile Walter Benjamin and Antoine Berman's theories showcasing the immense possibilities afforded by multiple performances of a text were enshrined in a feminist translation practice. Judith Butler developed Simone de Beauvoir's problematising of an unequal gender duality in reconceptualising gender as a performance. A perceivable overlap emerged between theories around gender performativity and the performativity of translation. Developments in gender theory and translation have thus led to a translational exploration of Butler's theory of performativity through the regendering strategy at the core of this dissertation. A feminist interpretation of Fran?oise Sagan's first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, provides the testing ground for this playful strategy with a view to establishing it as an eyecatching style of performing feminist texts. In rewriting selected passages from Sagan???s novel with regendered protagonists, the inequalities inherent in 'official' language in favour of a masculine perspective are exposed and transformed to redress the balance. Here a bisexual and unashamedly promiscuous career woman and mother figure is written into the target text with the effect of normalising sexual emancipation and non-binary parenting. Regendering can thus advance the work of feminist translation and at the same time advance the project begun by Fran?oise Sagan at the start of her literary career to demote the importance placed on gender by disrupting gender norms. ???Je n???arrive pas ?? faire des distinguos entre les hommes et les femmes. Comme entre les jeunes et les vieux. [???] Ce sont des personnes.??? [I am unable to make a distinction between men and women. Or between young and old. [???] They are people.??? (Sagan 1994 quoted in Lloyd 1995: 56)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".