David Coward, translator of Jules Verne and of many other French writers

I've been studying David Coward's 2017 translation, from source language French into target language English, of Jules Verne's classic mid-19th-century novel Vingt Mille Lieues Sous Les Mers. I'm analysing certain chapters from the viewpoint of descriptive-explanatory translation studies, in order to ascertain the overall concept of translation evident in Coward's rendering; the norms of translation to which he adheres; the multiplicity of interacting reasons for/causes of his translation choices, and the types of creativity evident in his rewriting of this Verne classic. 

The reason I'm carrying out this research is in order to write a forthcoming article, and later monograph, on creativity in translation. 

Coward's translation is highly accurate, couched in non-imitative, natural, idiomatic target language expression, and displays creativeness largely through inventive synonymy, syntactic modification, explicitation, expansion, some reduction or simplification, and, especially, interpretation and slight shifts, at low levels, in source text meaning, while preserving global semantic accuracy. Creativity is equally displayed by David Coward in his detailed Introduction and his endnotes and footnotes, which fulfill the exegetic and didactic functions of the translator. 

This post is by way of a very succinct report on my initial research findings in this investigation I'm doing into various contemporary renderings/retranslations of Verne's above-mentioned novel. The forthcoming article will, of course, provide some pertinent examples of Coward's various translation strategies, trying to describe and explain them. The focus of the examples (of coupled pairs of replaced and replacing segments, to use Toury's 1995 DTS terms) will be on highlighting Coward's resourcefulness, originality and creativity as a translator. Some of his translational language is modernizing and informal, which is also the case in another Penguin publication of a Verne translation, viz. Michael Glencross's 2004 rendering of Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours (1873/2004). 

In contrast, William Butcher's 1992 translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea differs from Coward's in its more imitative approach, though Butcher revised this rendering to make it more idiomatic, though preserving many of his original translation choices. 

On the other hand, Walter and Miller's 1993 rendering of the same novel is, at times, more informal than the Coward or Butcher versions. It is equally idiomatic, well-researched and creative in its choices of synonyms.