Making a contribution to the still under-researched translation history of Verne's
Extraordinary Journeys this book examines the causes of a selection of renderings from French
into English of the 1873 Jules Verne novel Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the
World in Eighty Days). This study integrates a number of methodologies in order to offer a
comprehensive explanation of translation outcomes. It presents a diachronic investigation of
the multiple interacting translation causes which have produced various retranslations of the
same work. A corpus of target texts from 1873 to 2004 is analysed in order to discover the
translation strategies employed and their likely causes using Pym's (1998) model of the four
Aristotelian causes of social phenomena as applied to translation. Translators' biographical
details are studied to ascertain the agency of the translator. The book addresses the
difficulties encountered in uncovering biographical information on certain translators and the
considerations involved in selecting a suitable corpus of retranslated texts. It provides some
understanding of the reasons for which retranslations of a canonical novel are undertaken and
contributes to arguments concerning translation universals.
