Comprendre la sagesse culturelle yémba: une perspective traductologique à travers l’étrangéisation

Abstract

This paper sets out to answer the question of the translation strategy used to ease the understanding of some proverbs in the corpus under study. It aims at identifying, describing and analysing this strategy in the translation of Yemba proverbs into French. It also sets out to solve the problem of the constant difficulty to understand the rendering of proverbs from a local language into an official one without losing the cultural flavour. In translation studies, the translator has a number of translation strategies to go for. He can either foreignize his text or domesticate it, depending on his translation brief as mentioned by Schleiermacher (1999). Hence, it is necessary to define a translation strategy prior to the translation process. This study attempts to ease the understanding of the Yemba cultural wisdom through foreignization, underpinned by one of the direct translation techniques (literal translation). It has sample six proverbs culled from a proverb book. The study has as theoretical frame, the linguistic theory of translation and as methodological frame, the classification of cultural elements developed by Katan (1999) and Hofstede (2010). For data analysis, it uses the comparative and descriptive approaches adapted from the models of Berman (1995) and Kruger & Wallmach (1997) and mainly uses the analysis grill by Wanchia (2017). The paper concludes that foreignization largely dominates Fogui’s translations. As scientific contribution, we note that foreignization gives translators considerable leeway in understanding the African culture, even though this process can also be favored through domestication.