Denotation, Connotation… "Subnotation": Three Linguistic Terms of Meaning and Their Impact in Translation (Spanish-French domain)

Abstract

The practice of literary translation often highlights the poetic resonance of prose texts. In this particular case, it is incumbent upon the translator to separate the traits that correspond to the genius of the “source-language” and those that can be put down to the creator’s creative genius, knowing that all writers embed in their prose a certain number of “deliberate acts”, but also sometimes make “Freudian slips” (to use Freudian terminology) that betray hidden intentions or more simply errors in editorial strategy, or even “language mannerisms”. These observations have led us to call such phenomena “subnotation”, which we will document in our paper using examples taken from literary works written in Spanish.