Exposing myself: reading, translating, rewriting Marie Nimier's La nouvelle pornographie
Bibliographic record
Abstract
If writing erotica or pornography is an intimate process for any author, equally, if not more so, is the act of translating it: the translator of erotica enters into the very personal space of a stranger, walking alongside, reliving the other’s fantasies, experiencing corporal and spiritual sensations of love, desire and lust, then reinterpreting these for the foreign reader. Thus, translating erotica is undoubtedly a most intimate gesture. Through the process of reading and translating erotic literature, I have pondered numerous questions: How and why does the translator approach the erotic text? How does the interaction of objectivity and subjectivity come into play for the translator of this genre? Essentially, what is the rapport between author, translator, reader, and narrator in the context of the pornoerotic? Furthermore, in what ways is the translator’s procedure similar or different from that of literary translation in general? Undoubtedly, the challenges of translating pornography or erotica include and yet surpass those encountered in other types of literary translation. Beginning with an examination of the elusive definitions of erotica and pornography, intertwined with delimitations of literature and mass-produced fiction, I explore in this MA thesis the issues and problems that arose during my experience of translating Marie Nimier’s auto-fictional novel La nouvelle pornographie. On the practical side, there were specific lexical difficulties as well as challenges in recreating in English sexual desire and physical interactions written in French. On the professional side, struggles with censorship, taboos, and the questionable academic suitability of this marginal genre; all of which make the study of pornography and erotica, along with the practice of translating, it a transgressive and an uncomfortably intimate act.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".