Christine Angot claims the right to feed her novelistic universe mainly with facts from her real life. This radicalism earned her a conviction in court, on May 27, 2013, for violation of private life in the novel Les petits. She was convicted for turning a real recognizable person of her entourage, into an unflattering novel character. The Parisian Court found that Les petits, could not be described as a "novel", despite the assertions of the author and her publisher, and despite the fact that it is presented to the public with the qualification “novel” in the paratext. This position seems extreme in so far as the magistrates choose to ignore the notion of genre, a notion still fundamental today. One can, as a matter of fact, argue that the genre should be considered constitutive of the meaning, and accept that the interpretation depends on the genre, that it is genre-bound. To that extent, to simply discard the notion of genre seems unacceptable. To counter the reasoning of the Court, Angot develops a certain number of arguments that will be addressed using the theories of Genette, Searle and Cohn. We will come to the conclusion that by taking into account literary and linguistic theories, and therefore the manner in which an eventual breach in privacy occurred, the Court could have made a fairer and more readily accepted decision, or at least one more in accordance with the rule of proportionality expected in every democracy.

This paper presents findings on the use of brackets in original texts and translations based on the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus (LEGS). The results show that in originals, brackets are the most frequent in English and the least in Swedish. Translations usually contain more brackets than originals. There are two reasons for this. First, most brackets are retained, and secondly, many are added. Added brackets mostly contain short synonyms facilitating target-reader comprehension. English translators introduce the most changes (additions, omissions, downgrades and upgrades), and Swedish ones the least. Brackets tend to fulfil content-oriented rather than interpersonal functions. When brackets are replaced by other punctuations marks in translations, these tend to be commas or no punctuation marks at all. German originals have a stronger preference for bracketing phrases than clauses compared to English and Swedish. These German phrasal brackets are often expanded into clauses in translations.

Family and intimate relationships across borders is a central topic in migration literature. This article investigates the representation of the transnational family in Dime algo sobre Cuba (1998), by the Cuban writer and filmmaker Jesús Díaz. Written from exile in Spain, the novel is set in Cuba’s “Special Period” of post-Cold War economic crisis and emigration of balseros (‘rafters’). The highly original plot of a twofold perilous voyage between Havana and Miami incorporates elements from both exile literature and undocumented migration narratives, but it also goes beyond the established patterns of these genres. Drawing on transnational family studies and feminist theory, this paper examines how the characters experience the migration process with focus on the internal dynamics of the subjects that comprise the family, their relations to multiple places, as well as the narrative modes of representing these relations. It shows the internal dynamics of the protagonist’s family as a split narrative of dis- and reintegration across political and national borders. It also discusses the lived experience of the double orientation of the migrant subject, facing a lost home(land) as well as a new place which s/he still does not inhabit. The analysis suggests that the process of the reorientation of the migrant subject is articulated as a gendered and sexualised narrative of the intimate relations of the protagonist, intertwined with the narrative of the homeland. However, the ambivalent ending of the novel with its references to cultural hybridity points to an opening where the future of Cuban exile and diaspora lies in the ability to forgive and establish cultural contact across borders.

This paper investigates English supplementive ing-clauses (e.g., Hitler exploded, demanding examples.) in German and Swedish contrast. The material consists of popular non-fiction originals and their translations from the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus (LEGS) (version 0.1). The results show that coordination is the most frequent correspondence of supplementive ing-clauses in German and Swedish translations and originals. Like the supplementive ing-clause, a coordination is a compressed and semantically indeterminate structure. The other major correspondences include subordination, main clause and prepositional phrase. German translators more often use main clauses than Swedish translators, which seems to be related to an increasing German tendency for parataxis rather than hypotaxis. A number of German and Swedish instances involve different kinds of explicitation, including conjunctions and German pronominal adverbs.

This study investigates acronyms in English originals and their translations into German and Swedish, comparing forms, functions and distributions across the languages. The material was collected from the Linnaeus English-German-Swedish corpus (LEGS) consisting of original and translated popular non-fiction. From a structural point of view, acronyms most often occur as independent noun heads (When IBM introduced […]) or as premodifiers in a noun phrase (PGP encryption). Due to morphosyntactic differences, English acronym premodifiers often merge into hyphenated compounds in German translations (UN-Klimakonvention), but less frequently so in Swedish. The study also discusses explicitation practices when introducing source-culture specific acronyms in the translations. German translators explain and elaborate more than Swedish translators and they do so in the German language. Swedish translators, however, use English to a greater extent, suggesting that Swedish readers are expected to have better knowledge of English than German readers.