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Article published In:
Translating Creolization
Edited by Desrine Bogle, Ian Craig and Jason F. Siegel
[Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 2:2] 2016
► pp. 195–219

Critical cultural translation

A case of translating creolization in newspaper tales of Trinidad 1919–1920

| 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.

Keywords: cultural translation, creolization, Trinidad, discourse, folktales, short story
Published online: 31 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ttmc.2.2.02fig
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