Abstract

This thesis is designed as an encounter between translation studies and ethnography. It demonstrates how a cross-fertilization between those two disciplines can be achieved for the benefit of both. If several of the research methods employed to gather the data analysed are those currently used by translation studies specialists investigating all manner of translation, others, such as field research, are typical of ethnography. And while some of the theoretical framework upon which the thesis builds its argumentation is essentially that of translation studies, translation theories formulated by practitioners of anthropology have not been ignored. The thesis takes the form of a case study. Its object of inquiry is an ethnographer's recording of the telling of an age-old narrative by an Aboriginal elder in his own Northern Tutchone language, and the subsequent translation, textualization and publication of this narrative into English and into French. It establishes why and how this elder and this ethnographer agreed to collaborate to transform this traditional narrative into two learned publications. The central question that the thesis asks is this: How did a combination of linguistic, social, cultural, historical, institutional and political constraints operate on each state of the text of this traditional Tutchone story cycle to make it such as we find it in the published books? Manifestations of those limiting factors are identified and their effects are assessed in each state of the text as well as in the paratext of the forewords and afterwords of the English and French publications. Such restrictions are moreover shown not to be confined to this particular case since analogous forces are demonstrated to have similarly informed other recent Yukon ethnographic encounters