Traduction du discours humaniste dans « Les Déboires » de Dieudonné de Francis Beng Nyamnjoh

Abstract

This study stemmed from the observation that English-speaking Cameroonian literature makes use of humanist discourse among many others to denounce the failings of leaders and the misery of peoples in a bilingual and multicultural context. Translating, therefore, texts imbued with humanist discourse could be a challenge for the literary translator, despite being an intercultural mediator. With regard to this skill, does the translator's strategy succeeded in preserving the essence and richness of the original text destined from the start for a French readership? In this light, the analysis below examined the translation and meaning preservation of the structuring elements of the said discourse in Francis Nyamnjoh's Les Déboires de Dieudonné. Thus, based on Berman's Translation Critism which convened Touré's Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and focusing on few extracts taken from the aforementioned corpus, our analyses aim first to identify the structuring elements of Nyamnjoh's humanist discourse, then to describe the strategy and procedures employed by the translator, and finally to justify in the post-colonial literature framework, the scope of the author's discourse in French. The results obtained after this study shows that the translator used 86% of foreignization, against 14% of naturalization. These results lead us to conclude that literal translation is par excellence, the indispensable procedure in the translation of literary works, in other words it remains the guarantor of a scrupulous morphosyntactic analysis and a correct semantic analysis of the lexemes in the text.