Publications
Publication details [#5764]
Brodsky, Françoise. 1996. La traduction du vernaculaire noir: l'exemple de Zora Neale Hurston [Black vernacular in translation: the case of Zora Neale Hurston]. In Gouanvic, Jean-Marc, ed. Parcours de la traduction [Pathways of translation]. Special issue of Traduction Terminologie Rédaction (TTR) 9 (2): 165–178. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
Publication type
Article in Special issue
Publication language
French
Keywords
Person as a subject
Abstract
To translate Black English, the translator must demonstrate a creative spirit. A good example is that of Zora Neale Hurston, a novelist and anthropologist, for she manages to capture with the same ease the drawl of Southern peasants and the quick tongue of Harlem boys, the accent from the Mississippi delta and that of travelling hired hands. Her writing is representative of a culture marked by folk and biblical storytelling, which uses coded language to assert African-American resistance to white oppression. Hurston's narratives are written in classical English, but her dialogues are in Black American, represented phonetically. The translator is not dealing with "correct" English on one hand and a dialect on the other, but rather with two different languages, both of which are equally important: the narrative, although written in "good" English, is informed by the African-American oral tradition; the dialogues are in Black American, transliterated with such uncanny precision that each character "speaks" in a way that situates him or her socially and/or regionally. The translator must be able to identify the subtle stylistic techniques used in the narrative. And in order to translate the drawl of the dialogue, with its peculiar grammar, its redundancies, its metaphors and similes, its mix of slang and scientific or pseudo-scientific terms, its use of Elizabethan vocabulary and grammatical forms reminiscent of its African past, the translator has to "create" a new language, a visual equivalent that will give the reader a feel of the rhythm, the accents and the verbal invention that are so typical of Black English.
Source : Abstract in journal