Critical cultural translation
A case of translating creolization in newspaper tales of Trinidad 1919–1920
Renee Figuera | The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago
This case study uses tools from Critical Discourse Analysis and Translation Studies to explain the translation of Creole aesthetics
in thirty-two written folktales of Trinidad, after World War I. The serial publication of these local folktales within the
Trinidad Weekly Guardian and the Argos newspapers coincided with a period of cultural
transformation in Trinidad, when local newspapers became the caretakers of a national literature in print. The researcher uses
translation as a metaphor to critically analyze the process and function of intercultural transfer between oral and written
folktale cultures, while showing how intercultural translation was effected in the folktale, at this time. In the final analysis,
the study traces the forward reach of translating creolization beyond the period of WWI, into a period that is better known for
the foregrounding of the Creole under class, in the short stories of Beacon and Trinidad of 1929
to 1930. It is a significant study because it identifies many translation shifts in Creole culture towards establishing the
conventions of the modern short story of the 1930’s. In particular, the re-writing of oral tales enabled a discursive shift in
focus in favor of the ordinary class, race-relations in society, the melding of folk mythologies for didactic purposes, and a
language shift from the folktale’s French-Creole language base to an English-oriented literate culture. In this way, it
perpetuated a neo-colonial agenda of translating creolization as the discursive recolonization of Creole folktale culture with
exocentric conventions.
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Cited by 1 other publications
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