Translation : culture power psyche : Camara Laye's L'enfant noir and James Kirkup's The African child

Translation

Culture power psyche

The encounter of James Kirkup's The African Child with Camara Laye's L'Enfant Noir has resulted in the latter work enjoying an apparently everlasting popularity, with its latest Plon edition coming out as recently as March 2006.

Our intention here is not to make a purely literary study of the two works. but rather a parallel study of problems of translation that thcy contain. By translation is meant here Laye's transposition of his Malinke culture into the French language on the one hand, and on the other, Kirkup's rewriting of Laye's text into English.

Our objective is twofold :

• Go along with what translation specialists have been discussing for quite some time now-that the translator necessarily works under the influence of external factors such as historical, cultural, even economic contingences,
• Go bdyond this conception and argue that, depending on circumstances, the influencing factors can come right from within the translator him/herself.

In the final analysis, a possibly utopian but perfectly relevant claim is expressed : the need for some sort of freedom of translation !