Wòch Nan Dlo a

The following is an extended outline for my paper, “Aslan of the Antilles: A Commission and Skopos for a Haitian Creole Translation of C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew .” Part One: An Experiment in Auto-Commission The first section of this paper is conceived as a Vermeerian auto-commission for a Haitian Creole translation of C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew . I will begin by examining the Haitian social context, the growing emphasis on mother tongue instruction in the country, and the need for literature (particularly children’s literature) in this emergent literary language. I will make reference to Even-Zohar’s concept of the potential centrality of translation in a “young” or “peripheral” national literature, and make the case that twenty-first century Haiti represents such a situation. I will then describe the logic of contributing this particular text to the growing Creole corpus. The novel contains many features which make it appropriate to the Haitian co...

As a student of history with a strong interest in translation for its own sake, I found this weeks readings particularly eye-opening. Quite often when I read history—whether primary documents or the works of historians—I ask myself how these people from various linguistic communities are communicating. Despite Julio-César Santoyo’s attestation that there are “thousands of examples [… of] documents that tell of interpreters involved in embassies and legations (both secret and official), peace and trade treaties, settlements of frontiers, royal marriages,” the fact remains that the critical role of translators and interpreters is overwhelmingly absent from historical records and narratives. 1 This, no doubt, speaks to the ubiquity of translators and the notion that a good translator must remain invisible, but it also poses a problem for those who wish to study the history of translation. I would be keenly interested, for instance, to know more about the processes and power dynamics at ...