• How was the bridging between these practices and their corresponding disciplines carried out? Did concepts of cultural translation move from translation and writing towards theory or the other way round?6 Or did they rather merge?

• What has been the effect of this bridging on other concepts of interlingual and intercultural transfer? Did it contribute (when, where, for whom) to a growing conceptual diversity and the creation of new relations between translation and adjacent concepts (see D’hulst forthcoming)?

• What has been the effect on translation norms themselves?

Let us briefly glimpse the relations between the concepts of partial, intratextual, translation and of "full" intertextual translation in the contemporary Francophone Caribbean novel. As a hypothesis, one could understand the former as a metonymy for the latter, i.e. for a sort of translation that seems to be rare or unsatisfying in terms of cultural adequacy for a given group of writers and critics favoring the thesis of linguistic and cultural hybridization or métissage. The function of partial translation could well be, then, to represent a positive or a negative (ironic in the case of Chamoiseau) model of intertextual translation: "[…] la traduction est une véritable opération de créolisation, désormais une pratique nouvelle et imparable du précieux métissage culturel" (Glissant 1996:45).

Yet the understanding of translational relations in terms of a metonymic link should also account for a conceptual basis that underlies the formal differences between partial and full translation, i.e. between a mode of intratextual bridging between language variants, both French and Creole,8 and a mode of intertextual bridging between two literatures. This basis could be the trope of translation as intercultural bridging.

As a matter of fact, it is the supposed connection between a common basis and different translation functions and forms that may help us to understand the emergence and evolution of a more or less "free space" within the concept of translation, a space where the interlingual and intralingual, the verbal and non-verbal aspects of translation, meet and merge to a certain extent. This space could be described as a locus of experimentation, empowering a set of textual categories and literary forms as encountered frequently in diglossic and postcolonial writing (theme of translation, narrator-translator, character of the translator, etc.) with selected items from the translation concept. It is precisely this disconnection from mainstream conventions about "language" and "translation" that creates the possibility of a critical distance, enhancing the input of forms and concepts from adjacent practices and disciplines.

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