Traduire l'Afrique du Sud post-Apartheid : quelle approche?

Ludivine Huet-Haupt (1)

1 Department of French

Writing can be both an act of empowerment and a way of making known things that ought to be known. In South Africa, the focus of our deliberations here, during the Apartheid years, authors were not allowed to write and express themselves freely, all writing being carefully monitored and controlled or banned. But voices could be heard outside ... from the pen of exiles, for example. Translation fills the same function, and in fact plays an even more important role because it reaches an even wider audience. It can also assist in forming cultural constructs and play a role in bridging a gap caused by political and linguistic change in a multilingual society. These functions are crucial in the "translational reality" of South Africa - the reality of 11 official languages and concomitant cultural diversity and of course the continuing need to relate to the larger world. Institutionalized translator training has become indispensable in such a rapidly changing country. These truths stem from the way messages are conveyed - must be conveyed - when filtered through the Other's language and expectations. For translation involves not just language, it is a cultural transfer. An awareness of cultural differences and similarities of socially conditioned aspects of life is essential in the interpretation of meaning because the act of translating must negotiate discursive differences in terms of cultural values, ideologies and identities.

Mots clés: translation; cultural context; apartheid

Domaines: Littératures

Ludivine Huet-Haupt. Traduire l'Afrique du Sud post-Apartheid : quelle approche?. IFAS Working Paper Series / Les Cahiers de l' IFAS, 2005, 6, p. 32-38. ⟨hal-00797897⟩