Official bilingualism in Canada and translation: literary interpretations of Patrice Desbiens and Jacques Brault/E.D. Blodgett

Transfiguration by Jacques Brault and E. D. Blodgett (1998), and L'homme invisible/The Invisible Man by Patrice Desbiens (1981) are located at the crossroad of Canada's official languages. The first is an exchange between a Quebecois and an Albertan poet; the second narrates the bilingual experience of a Franco-Ontarian protagonist. Both of these texts have been commented upon for their parodies of the symmetrical bilingualism promoted by Canada's Official Languages Act. This article describes their ideological and formal relationships with official bilingualism and with the translation practices associated with it. It focuses on the common framework official bilingualism grants them and on the various strategies explored by the authors to subvert this framework. The texts studied show two very different reactions that put translation to work in contrasting ways. As a result, this article's conclusion calls for a comparatism that, instead of limiting its exploration to the differences between English and French or even their contact zone, concentrates on the different relationships with translation emanating from that very zone. In the narrow interstice between English and French lies a world as heterogeneous as the two sociolinguistic spaces it both joins and opposes. Adapted from the source document