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Jansson, Kristina, 2006. Saisir l’insaisissable. Les formes et les traductions du discours indirect libre dans des romans suédois et français. Acta Wexionensia nr 86/2006. ISSN: XXXX-XXXX, ISBN: 91-7636-499-2. Written in French. The purpose of this study is to explore the possible forms and translations of free indirect discourse (discours indirect libre) in some French and Swedish novels written between 1880 and 1920. For the study, two corpora containing free indirect discourse (FID) were established: one with Swedish FID from some 40 novels written by August Strindberg, Selma Lagerlöf, Hjalmar Bergman and Hjalmar Söderberg and one with FID from one novel each by Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, and two by Anatole France. These two corpora were compared in order to examine the influence of grammar, translational norms and individual translators on the final result. Another purpose was to compare the forms of FID in French and Swedish since they differ somewhat. The biggest difference seems to be that Swedish has a greater aptitude for mixing elements from several levels of narration. The study itself is divided in two parts. The first one explores the individual characteristics that create FID, their forms and their translation. There seems to be no syntactical difference in the treatment of personal pronouns, the alterations seem to be the result of a change made by the translators. The treatment of verb tenses and adverbials differs somewhat. One of the characteristics of FID is that it combines deictic adverbials focalised through the characters with verb tenses focalised through the narrator. French adverbials, above all deictic time adverbials, are restricted in that they cannot occur juxtaposed to all verb tenses, whereas Swedish is free to do so to a higher extent, a difference that influences the translation. Verb tenses are also a problem in that the French language has two, passé simple and imparfait, the former rare in FID, where Swedish only has preteritum. Other characteristics of FID, such as repetitions, hesitations, the use of proper names etc. cause fewer problems in translation. The second part of the analysis handles the destiny of all of FID in translation. 91% of the French FID remain in the Swedish translations, whereas 82% remain in the French translations, numbers that show that there is a difference between the languages. This final part also analyses the reasons behind the transformation of FID into other forms of speech rendering in translation, including the translator’s influence over transformations that can be compared to that of the narrator over speech rendering.