La formation des traducteurs en Amérique du Nord et en Europe occidentale au XXe siècle

This thesis centers on the history of translator training since its institutionalization in the mid twenthieth century. Our goal is to trace the development of translation as an academic discipline within the university set up by considering the types of departments offering translator training and the types of programs that are being offered. We have carried out a descriptive study by presenting a historical picture of translator training in the following four countries: Canada, France, the United Kingdom, the United States of America. Our study reveals the difficult circumstances that surrounded the institutionalization of translation in each of these countries. Due to the opposition from academia and society at large, translation could not find its place among other disciplines because translation was considered a vocational activity, therefore unfit to be taught as an academic subject within the university structure. As a result, different training models were developed in different countries in order to meet local and national demands. These diverse training models form the object of our study. We have presented a historical description of university translation programs from their inception in the 1950-60s to 2016. Our study reveals how translation programs changed from being linguistics oriented to adopting a professional approach. Beyond that, our research also sheds light on the aspects of translator training in which significant development has occurred in each of the countries studied. Our study is a sociohistorical and exploratory research inscribed within the documentary interpretative theory framework. This theoretical approach was developed by historians like Leopold Ranke (1795-1886), Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-1884) et Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) in the XIXth century (Müller, 2009). The interpretative theory argues that documents are « ‘social constructions’ by particular individuals at particular times which could be the object of varying interpretations by different ‘audiences’ with varying effects » (Jupp et Norris, 1993, p. 38). The documentary interpretative approach is used in qualitative research. Our research methodology is sociohistorical and exploratory. We started out by gathering our data from different types of documents, then proceeded through a rigorous selection of these documents by applying the criteria proposed John Scott (1990) and Gary McCulloch (2004) namely authenticity, reliability, validity, credibility, representativeness, clarity of meaning and theorisation. We adopted, as method of analysis for theorisation, analytic induction proposed by Florian Znaniecki (1934, p. 235-245) to examine each of our research questions in order to describe the facts revealed by our results. Our research shows that, in general, development has occurred in translator training, nevertheless, the degree of this development varies from one country to another. In 2016, the majority of translator training programs are still being housed in departments of foreign languages. In other cases, the translation sections share the same department with the linguistics, literature or foreign language sections (among others).

Keyphrases: Canada, France, Translation, Translators, Training, Teaching, Institutionalization, United Kingdom, United States of America