Rabelais et ses phraséologismes gargantuesques : analyse des procédés de phraséotraduction en polonais, BCMS, chinois, japonais et portugais brésilien

The article explores the translation of phraseological units (PUs) from Chapter XI of Gargantua by François Rabelais into five languages: Polish, Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS), Chinese, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese. The main difficulty in the phraseological translation of the selected text lies in the fact that the therein present PUs have to be taken both in the literal and the figurative phraseological sense. This problem resulted in translators sometimes sacrificing one of the two possible reading layers. Following a theoretical examination of the PUs characteristics and their unfrozenness, the analysis of the translations into five selected languages takes from Hejwowski’s (2015) classification of the translation techniques adapted to the purpose of the work. Based on that, we could identify and evaluate the different ways the translators adapted the Rabelaisian wordplay to the cultural universe of their own language. We also identified an additional technique involving the translator’s phraseological innovation, where the Rabelaisian wordplay in the PUs is reproduced in a very free and creative way in another cultural universe.