Translating culture

Translating culturemes (lexical units carrying cultural information) remains a headache for translators. This difficulty is even greater when it comes to translating African culturèmes into Indo-European languages, in this case French. Indeed, due to the domesticating nature of French domain translation, many African authors, notably English-speaking Cameroonian authors, are reluctant to have their works translated into French, for fear of seeing their culture diluted or even erased. The corpus of The Crown of Thorns and Chopchair by Linus T. Asong’s The Crown of Thorns and Chopchair serves as a framework for analyzing, evaluating and assessing the strategies and techniques that can guarantee the otherness contained in the source texts. It is in this concern to create a crossroads between the given and the received that the strategy of decentering emerges and positions itself as an alternative to domestication and foreignization. In so doing, it creates an environment of intercultural dialogue in which the source culture is preserved and embraces the canons of the target language.