Wòch Nan Dlo a

Annotated Bibliography for “Aslan of the Antilles: A Commission and Skopos for the Translation of C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew into Haitian Creole.” Source Text and Reference Texts: Lewis, C. S. The Magician’s Nephew . 1955. Reprint, New York: HarperCollins, 2002. I will be exploring the translatability of C.S. Lewis’s 1955 children’s fantasy novel The Magician’s Nephew into Haitian Creole, developing a skopos to guide the process, and using this framework to analyze certain issues that the project will present. As a work of fantasy fiction written in England in the 1950s, the novel presents several complications that will need to be addressed in order to produce an intelligible Haitian Creole version. Lewis, C. S. Konpè Lyon, Konmè Lougawou ak Amwa majik la . Translated by Hans Michel Fortunat and Matthew Robertshaw. Pompano Beach, FL: Educa Vision, 2017. The Magician’s Nephew is a prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . I will draw ex...

While reading about Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory and the potential centrality of translated works in a national literature, I couldn’t help but think about Haiti. The author identifies three contexts in which translation can play a central role in the development of a national literature: (1) when a literature is “young”, (2) when it is “weak” or “peripheral”, or (3) when it encounters turning points, crises, or vacuums. 1 Haiti has a strong literary tradition in French, stretching back to the nineteenth century, but its national literature in Haitian Creole (the first language of the entire population, and the only language of the vast majority), only began to develop in earnest in middle of the twentieth century. In fact, the birth of Haitian Creole literature can be positively dated to 1953, and the appearance of two important works by one highly influential author. Even-Zohar would be delighted to know that one of them was a translation. The translation in quest...

We’ve encountered norms before in this course, and I found them a compelling and useful concept then. Anthony Pym, in the video “What is Translation Studies?,” referred to Toury, and claimed that the idea of norms solves the classic conflict between linguistic and literary approaches to Translation Studies. Pym described norms as guiding principles that allow for deviation and creativity. 1 Now, having spent some time reading Toury, I see that norms are central to the descriptive branch of Translation Studies, and thus a fundamental part (the epitome , as Toury says) of the target-oriented approach. 2 In particular, I took to Toury’s view that norms are inherently unstable, and change over time. This acknowledges that the translator has approximate boundaries, but also has the capacity to push those boundaries. Generally, Toury gives the translator much autonomy while still insisting that he or she is subject to a multitude of pressure and may face consequences for excessive deviati...

After trying in vain to track down one of the books I had intended to study for my research paper, I have decided on a different direction. Rather than comparing various Creole translations of a work of French-language Haitian fiction, my new plan is to analyze a work of English fiction, and the strategies it will take for me to translate it into Creole. As I noted in my Introduction , I previously co-translated C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe into Haitian Creole , and, since there are six remaining books in the series, I would like to use this opportunity to define the skopos and analyze various difficulties I will face in producing a second translation in the Chronicles of Narnia suite. And so... Research question: Drawing from Hans Vermeer ’ s skopos theory, as well as a number of Translation Studies articles dealing specifically with children ’ s literature, I will analyze the translatability of C.S. Lewis ’s children ’s novel The Magician ’s Nephew ...

The question of equivalence is central to an understanding of translation. Can any word, with all its semantic baggage, ever find an equivalent in another language? Is precise translation possible at the morphological level? For that matter, is there such thing as equivalence within a language? Are there perfect synonyms? In his essay “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” Roman Jakobson maintains that “there is ordinarily no full equivalence between code-units.” 1 As a trained linguist, Jakobson was well aware of the arbitrary relationship between signs and the things they represent. He knew, for instance, that even a word as seemingly simple as ‘cheese’ —the definition of which seems external of the symbol, bound to something  concrete and found in the real world—has countless nuances of meaning within and between languages. He insists, however, that translation is not a lost cause, as it is always possible to express the full meaning of a word through “loan-words or loan-tran...

Here are some initial thoughts on my research paper: Research question: For my research paper I’m planning to look at three recent Haitian Creole translations of Jacques Roumain’s celebrated novel Gouverneurs de la rosée (1944). One of them, Clotaire Saint-Natus’s Mèt lawouze douvanjou (2007) was written for a Haitian audience, while two, Maude Heurtelou’s Fòs lawouze (2000) and Jan Mapou’s stage adaptation Mèt lawouze (2012) were intended primarily for the Haitian diaspora in the United States. I would like to know how these three authors dealt with the challenges of translating a work of formal literature into an emergent literary language. I will draw from André Lefevere’s systems approach to literary studies to analyze how Saint-Natus, Heurtelou and Mapou’s refractions are shaped by the patronages and poetics of their milieus. Initial Bibliography: Fosdick, Charles. “Translation in the Caribbean, the Caribbean in Translation.” Small Axe 48 (November 2015): ...