Georgina Collins
14 August 2007
EST CONFERENCE 2007: Translation Studies Matters
[SLIDE 1]
The title of my paper is:
The Role of the Native Language in Translation Studies
INTRODUCTION
I would like to begin with a quote from Kwaku Gyasi:
[SLIDE 2]
the problematic crux of modern Europhone African literature is
precisely the issue of language and its relation to the notion of
translation. Clearly, African writers who make use of European
languages do not have the same attitude to these languages and
therefore do not follow a conventional approach in their use of
language (Gyasi Francophone 8)
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Georgina Collins
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And it is the unconventionality of language that will be the focal point
of this paper. As modern-day translators, we are used to taking the ‘cultural
turn’ in Translation Studies (Bassnett; Lefevere; Venuti), but rarely these
days do we turn towards the language. By this, I do not mean the French
that a Francophone text may be written in, but the language behind it, the
native tongue that has influenced it. There is no doubt that the large
majority of translators of Francophone texts do recognise when the text is of
the “non-standard” variety (Collie) and take relevant steps towards
replicating the key sounds and language diversity when translating the text
into English, for example. However, do many European translators try and
learn the native language of the postcolonial writer, so they have a true
insight into the writer’s linguistic world, so they can identify specific words
and grammatical constructs, selected sounds and deliberate phrasing? This
is the concept I intend to discuss – the idea of linguistic hybridity – the
native African language and its influence on French to English translation.
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The objectives of my research are clear;
[SLIDE 3]
 to find out if studying the native language can assist in translating the
Francophone text [POINT 1]
 to establish whether it is a necessity in postcolonial translation [POINT
2]
 to learn whether Translation Studies theories can be developed to
accommodate this concept [POINT 3]
 and to examine the impact on translation methodologies [POINT 4]
 I also hope to demonstrate how the development of the discipline matters
in the rewriting of Francophone African women’s literature, easing the
complexity of literary translation and contributing to research into
African languages [POINT 5]
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Georgina Collins
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APPROACH
In order to explore the influence of the native tongue, I will examine
the language of Wolof, using Maweja Mbaya’s analysis of language use in
Senegal as a framework for discussion (Pratiques). Subsequently, using
well-known Translation Studies theories as a framework for my
investigation, I will discuss how these theories and consequently French to
English translation methodologies, can be expanded to encompass the
concept of postcolonial translation and the impact of the native language. I
will use examples from texts by Senegalese women writers such as Kiné
Kirama Fall, Mame Seck Mbacké and Fatou Ndiaye Sow to support my
argument. In this way, I hope to show how the constant development and
increasing depth of Translation Studies as a discipline plays a key role in
European perceptions of African culture, by explaining what impact
translation-related phenomena, such as ‘native language learning’ in
translation, can have on the literature of a fast-developing country such as
Senegal.
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THE WOLOF LANGUAGE
In their discussion of the Wolof language, Michel Malherbe and Cheikh Sall
stated that:
[SLIDE 4]
Ce qui rend la culture sénégalais particulièrement passionnante,
c’est précisement qu’elle se situe au carrefour de trois mondes,
africain, musulman et européen
What makes Senegalese culture so exciting, is the fact that it
sits at the intersection between three worlds – African, Muslim
and European. (8)
And at this cultural junction, the pathways of languages converge;
Senegal is meeting place of around thirty African languages (Mbaya 51), the
language of religion – Arabic, and the language of the colonisers – French.
However, whilst French has tried to push aside the native languages, gaining
‘official’ status in Senegal, it is a language used in business and politics and
only spoken by 10% of the population (Malherbe 22). Instead, the language
of the Wolof kingdom is strong and resilient, and like a noisy highway
storming across the land, it seems to affect almost everything in its pathway.
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I chose to study the language of Wolof instead of one of the other 5 national
languages – Pular, Serer, Jola, Mandinke and Soninke (Mbaya 57) – for that
precise reason. Africa is a continent of many different languages and
Senegal reflects that in its language diversity, but what is so unusual is that a
native African language is spoken by over 80% of the population
(McLaughlin 153), and therefore impacts most people in the nation,
including Francophone writers.
In fact, in his analysis of language use in Senegal, Mbaya highlights
four different ways in which the French and Wolof languages interact to
produce a hybrid form of communication [SLIDE 5]. Firstly, there is
evidence of code-switching within conversations [POINT 1]; beginning a
discussion in Wolof, and switching to French half way through (91).
Secondly, there is evidence of grammatical influences of Wolof upon the
French language [POINT 2] where a French adjective such as “normal” is
transferred into the negative form using a Wolof construct – “normal”
becomes “normalul,” meaning ‘it isn’t normal’ (121). Thirdly, there is the
creation of entirely new words for phrases that are far more accessible in
Wolof, but these phrases are based around the French language [POINT 3].
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For example, “absenter quelqu’un” means ‘not to be able to find someone
because of their absence.” This does not exist in standard French, but it
sounds French (161). Finally, there is an entire dialect called “le français
sénégalais,” or “le français langue d’Afrique” [POINT 4] which is a total
mélange of the two languages – French constantly punctuated by African
words (171) and used on the streets of Senegal.
PASS ROUND HANDOUT
This idea of the growing influence of Wolof is defined by
McLaughlin as “wolofisation” which she describes as “the spread of Wolof
as a lingua franca” (153). However, it is more than that – one is not simply
talking about the presence of a common tongue spoken by users of different
languages, but also about the influence that tongue has on the other
languages that surround it. To simplify my analysis, I have classified the
different ways in which Wolof impacts upon the French language using the
following terms [SLIDE 6]: “general code-switching,” [POINT 1],
“grammatical manipulation” [POINT 2], “phrase invention,” a form of
calquing [POINT 3], and “complete hybridity” [POINT 4].
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I wish to add to these the concept of “sound imitation” [POINT 5], where a
writer mimics the sounds of her native language in her Francophone works.
To gain a greater insight into this process, I started learning Wolof,
and I chose to study women writers with traditional Wolof names such as
Bâ, Fall, Mbacke, Mbaye, Ndiaye, Seck and Sow (Malherbe 82), because the
likelihood of me identifying evidence of Wolof in their works was greater.
Firstly, I looked for “general code-switching.” This is particularly apparent
in Mame Seck Mbacké’s poetry collection entitled Pluie-Poésie: Les Pieds
Sur La Mer where she places a poem entitled Timis (extract 1 on your
handout) written in Wolof (33) half-way through the book. The rest of the
poems are written almost entirely in French.
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Georgina Collins
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In her poem entitled Toi Qui T’en Vas, (extract 2 on your handout),
Kiné Kirama Fall uses “phrase invention” to wolofise her works. For
example, a common introductory conversation in Wolof may consist of the
following banter between individuals:
- Na nga def?
- Maa ngi fi rekk.
- Sa yaram jàmm?
- Jàmm rekk.
Literally:
- How are you doing?
- I am here only.
- Your body peace?
- Only peace.
Meaning:
- How are you?
- I am fine.
- Are you well?
- Very well.
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Georgina Collins
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In her poem, Kiné Kirama Fall writes the lines, “Que la paix soit dans son
cœur / La paix seulement.” The phrase “Only peace” is not a phrase used
commonly in French or English, but it is recreated by Fall. Had the
translator not attempted to study Wolof, the depth of this phrase would not
be recognised.
To find an example of “complete hybridity,” I expanded my research
beyond poetry to Mame Seck Mbacké’s play Qui Est Ma Femme? (extract
3), where conversations between two of the protagonists combine both
Wolof and French. The Wolof has been highlighted in bold.
As an illustration of “sound imitation,” the poem Ce Soir by Fatou
Ndiaye Sow clearly replicates the sound of the Wolof language for it uses a
high number of plosive and nasal consonants, as highlighted in extract 4.
Wolof uses many of these consonants, which is in part due to the unusual
class system, which consists of eight words for ‘the,’ in the singular - ‘bi, gi,
ji, ki, li, mi and si’ (Malherbe 29), and also because Wolof nasalises certain
letters, those we often see transcribed as mb, mp, nd, nk, for example.
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Finally, the language simply does rely more on strong definite sounds than
either French or English.
The last concept is “grammatical manipulation.” One of the
noticeable features of Wolof is the lack of prepositions (Malherbe 35), and
this sometimes appears to affect the writing of Francophone texts, such as
the poem by Mame Seck Mbacké in extract 5 of your handout. Not only is
there a lack of prepositions, but also a lack of variety. This may be
deliberate or involuntary, but it is certainly a feature of the text and should
be considered during textual analysis pre-translation.
The ways in which Senegalese women writers hybridise their texts
therefore vary greatly from writer to writer. However, Gyasi talks of an
aggression in relation to the writing of Francophone African texts by
describing a “violence” used by authors against the colonial language,
distorting the European language to extremes to better represent their native
African tongue (African 157). But my experience so far of Senegalese
women writers is that they are generally more subtle than that. I would
describe their action as “clever manipulation” rather than “violence.”
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Georgina Collins
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TRANSLATION THEORIES
This study of Wolof as part of cultural analysis pre-translation can
assist in the interpretation of the Francophone text because it makes the
translator aware of cultural and linguistic elements that may otherwise be
overlooked. This can be explained using key Translation Studies theoretical
concepts and demonstrating how they can be adapted to the process of
translating a postcolonial text. As I only have limited time today, I have
chosen three different translation theories and adapted them to fit this model
of translation – Roman Jakobson’s translation typologies, norms of text type
and genre, and the cultural turn.
Roman Jakobson defined three different types of translation [SLIDE
7]; intralingual [POINT 1], interlingual [POINT 2], and intersemiotic
[POINT 3] (139). However, the journey of translated literature by
Senegalese women cannot be described as one or the other, as it is a
complex web of all three processes, where signs and languages are
constantly translated.
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If we look at the entire process [SLIDE 8], there are a number of different
stages from the conception to reception of a translated work. Just like many
other literary texts, Senegalese women’s works do not begin on the page, but
in the world around them, as non-verbal signs and thoughts which they
translate intersemiotically into language that will finally appear in a work of
literature. The translator must appreciate the author’s early stages in this
translation process or the cultural evaluation by the end reader will be
distorted.
The native language is an essential ingredient in this procedure; in
literature whereby the source text author is writing in a colonial language
and threading in her native tongue, the interplay between intralingual and
interlingual translation will be present at every stage of the creative process.
The source text writer works interlingually between her native language and
the colonial one, whilst the process of creative writing itself involves
constant rewriting and intralingual translation.
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If the translator’s intention is to be considerate of all aspects of the source
text and source writer, then surely this process should be mirrored in the
analysis, interpretation and translation itself; the translator must be prepared
to work with the two or more languages present and not simply translate
interlingually from French into English, for example.
Genre and text type are more directly linked to textual analysis rather
than the process of translation. Hatim and Mason define text type theory as
“a conceptual framework which enables us to classify texts in terms of
communicative intentions serving an overall rhetorical purpose” (140),
Katharina Reiss defined four text types [SLIDE 9] – content-focused
[POINT 1], form-focused [POINT 2], appeal-focused [POINT 3] and the
multimedia type [POINT 4], whilst Anna Trosburg stated that “genres
correspond directly to the text distinctions recognized by mature adult
speakers, reflecting differences in external format and situations of use” (6).
However, what happens when communicative intentions are not clear, and
the mature adult does not recognise the genre they are being faced with?
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Hatim and Mason describe a process called “intertextual hybridisation”
where “in subtle and highly intricate ways, a text is shifted to another type
and made to serve another purpose without completely losing at least some
of the properties of the original type” (147), and this also applies to genre.
By using characteristics of the native language of Wolof in their texts,
Senegalese women writers are modifying expected linguistic norms of genre
and text type. The genres of the texts I have analysed so far are all clearly
poetry, prose or drama, but the traditional linguistic norms have been
distorted, where sometimes the native language of oral literature intertwines
with the Western genre. The text-type is definitely expressive, but the native
language is used within it for a purpose – to inform the reader of cultural
issues related to language, converting the text to an expressive-informative
text. The translator must therefore take care to represent the linguistic norms
and characteristics of both text-types and both genres in translation.
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Georgina Collins
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The cultural turn was defined by André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett
as the turn towards “the larger issues of context, history and convention”
(11). An essential part of translation studies is therefore to place a text in the
context of the society or cultures in which it was created, and in order to
represent a culture, we need to look at what their culture means and not what
we perceive it to be. In her later essay on The Translation Turn in Cultural
Studies, Bassnett states that:
[SLIDE 10]
the problems of decoding a text for a translator involve so much
more than language, despite the fact that the basis of any
written text is its language (137).
This is very true: however, do we focus so much on four out of the
five cultural stimuli I highlighted earlier, that in depth analysis of the
language and linguistic hybridity can sometimes lose importance? My belief
is that we need to turn back towards the language, an integral part of the
hybrid nature of many postcolonial texts; looking at the native tongue of a
culture is an essential part of our investigation, but do all translators of
postcolonial texts concentrate on this enough?
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TRANSLATION METHODOLOGIES
In order to look at the impact of theoretical analysis on translation
methodologies, I would like to return to the extracts of Senegalese women’s
literature. Firstly, Mame Seck Mbacké’s “general code switching” where
she includes a Wolof poem in her Francophone collection.
The use of the Wolof language and the unusual layout of the poetry
mean the genre is unclear. Is this Western-style poetry or oral poetry more
reminiscent of African tradition? By “turning back towards the native
language,” and translating the poem literally at first, the genre is clearer,
individual phrases can be seen and understood, and the translator can make
an informed decision about how to lay out the poem in translation.
Furthermore, it is only by understanding a few words of Wolof that, if
translators choose to translate the entire collection, they would know they
probably don’t now need to translate this poem at all, for a version does
appear in French on the next page (6). The translator’s decision then would
be whether or not to translate the French or the Wolof version for an English
collection, for example. My translation can be found on your handout.
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Kiné Kirama Fall wolofised her works using “phrase invention.” It is
a perfect case of how Jakobson’s translation typologies have worked
together to produce a hybrid language often unidentifiable to the uninformed
translator. Translating within her languages, and between languages she has
created a French phrase from the native tongue – “Only peace.” The
translator who has studied Wolof to a small degree will recognise this phrase
and will be able to make an informed decision as to how this should be
translated; either literally from the French, or otherwise, or even adding a
footnote to explain the commonness of the phrase and its link with wellbeing. In this way, the translator is mirroring the behaviour of the source
text writer, by working interlingually between French, Wolof and English,
and intralingually in finding a suitable solution to explaining the phrase in
translation.
I used the example of Mame Seck Mbacké’s play Qui Est Ma
Femme? as an illustration of “complete hybridity.” If the translator
understands the native language of Wolof, he or she can see that Mame Seck
Mbacké has translated each of the Wolof phrases into French in the next
sentence. Whilst these phrases now may seem untranslatable, and more
suitable to leave as they are, this does not have to be the case.
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We could translate the Wolof of Senegal, a former French colony, to the
Wolof of the Gambia, a former British colony. A simple example of this
would be the word “Adina” becoming “Arduna,” or “solo” becomes
“sorhla.” Again, the translator is mirroring the source text writer by working
interlingually between the native language and the language of the coloniser.
Finally, the issues of “sound imitation” and “grammatical
manipulation” can be examined side by side. Ce Soir by Fatou Ndiaye Sow
brings us to the issue of “sound imitation.” In the extract from her poem, I
highlighted key “plosive” and “nasal” consonants that mimic the strong,
expressive sound of the Wolof language. Although some translation
scholars may argue that these are simply forms of alliteration and will be
recognised anyway by a good translator, for a semantic translation, defined
by Newmark as a form of translation that takes into account both contextual
meaning and aesthetic value (46), such as the one here [SLIDE 11], there
needs to be a recognition not just of the alliteration, but of the type of
alliteration, ie plosive and nasal consonants that reflect the native language.
Only in this way can a translator balance both meaning and aesthetics.
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In the poem, Approche de la Terre Gauloise, Mame Seck Mbacké
uses minimal prepositions with little variation, only using “sur”, “dans” and
“pour.” Again, this is clearly a case of the translator needing to focus on the
language aspect of the cultural turn, recognising that there is no need for
embellishment for the sake of word variation, for example, using “upon”
instead of “on,” or “within” or “inside” instead of “in.” Simplicity in this
case would provide a closer representation of the hybrid nature of the source
text.
Vinay and Darbelnet list seven different translation methodologies in
their analysis of translation between French and English [SLIDE 12]; the
procedures are “borrowing,” [POINT 1] “calque,” [POINT 2] “literal
translation,” [POINT 3] “transposition,” [POINT 4] “modulation,” [POINT
5] “equivalence” [POINT 6] and “adaptation,” [POINT 7] (55). The
examples I have examined use each of these methods: however I am arguing
that a thorough knowledge of the native language may alter which
methodology is used.
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Understanding that a word mimics the sound of the native language may
alter a translator’s perspective, so instead of using a literal translation, an
equivalent term may instead be used in order to represent both sound and
meaning at the same time. The number of methodologies has not changed,
but the way in which they are used has been adapted to suit the dimensions
of a hybrid text such as those written by Francophone Senegalese women
writers.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion [SLIDE 13], while learning foreign languages we are
made to believe in language purity and strict, specific grammatical rules, the
study of linguistic hybridity is a necessity in postcolonial translation if all
aspects of culture are to be considered [POINT 1], and this in turn affects
the way in which we, as translation studies scholars, approach our theories
and methodologies [POINT 2]. Moreover, the increased interest and
research into the genre makes an essential contribution towards the study of
hybrid languages [POINT 3]. The focus of this paper is also of key
importance if the interest in African women’s literature is to continue rising
like that of their male counterparts [POINT 4].
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Georgina Collins
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As my research continues I intend to delve deeper into the issues of
native language and postcolonial translation [SLIDE 14]; Further
investigation into male and female language use would now be of benefit, if
this paper is to focus more on the influence of gender in translation [POINT
1], and an analysis of additional Translation Studies theories [POINT 2] as
well as a broader range of writers [POINT 3], would also be valuable.
My paper also demonstrates the importance of continued research into
African languages in a postcolonial context, as well as supporting an
ongoing interdisciplinary focus in Translation Studies, a discipline that
matters because it is willing to develop as quickly as the world around it.
[SLIDE 15]
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