EMT Competences: Translation
Here are a handful of texts I translated, showing my translation skills.
Chimamanda Ngozl Adichie, We should all be feminists
I translated a part of Chimamanda Ngozl Adichie’s We should all be feminists essay from English into French.
My main goal through this work was to bring Chimamanda Ngozl Adichie’s feminist ideas into French using a feminist language. I used a vocabulary including words which are not widely accepted into the language (such as « toustes », as a gender-neutral translation of “everyone”) in order to render the message of the author as faithfully as possible, and taking into consideration the skopos (purpose) of the text. The goal is here, explicitly, to challenge gender norms, which I rendered through terminology which does just that.
This project was particularly meaningful in that it was the first time I managed to bring feminist terminology in a way that seemed fitting to the text. I felt like through this use of vocabulary, my translation added something to the original text, which could not be rendered in its original language of English.
For this project, I also made use of a CAT tool (Phrase), mostly in order to speed up my translation– though, as this project did not require heavily specific terminology, it didn’t speed up my work much.
I also took the time to re-format the text into a proper PDF document, as the original being a scan of a book would not have been easy to work with.
Wikipedia translation: Thomas(ine) Hall
I attempted a first draft translation of some of the sections of Thomas(ine) Hall’s (English) Wikipedia into French. Hall is a significant figure in intersexuality history as they were one of the first ever recorded case of someone openly identifying outside the traditional female/male binary. I chose to translate this article in order to visibilise intersexual and non-binary identities, and to practice strategies used to bring such identities into French.
The main challenge for this translation is the French language’s binary grammatical gender system: it requires all adjectives and most past-participles qualifying a person to be of either masculine or feminine grammatical gender– whichever corresponds to the social gender of the person being qualified. However, this system is clearly limited and does not provide any obvious way of referring to non-binary people. As such, my translation had to use very careful wording not to require the use of a word that would have to be synchronised to Hall’s gender.
While there exists systems that try to bring a 3rd, non-binary grammatical gender into French (see notably Alpheratz’s work), as none of the proposed systems are in common use in French, would feel foreign (and thus unsuited) for a Wikipedia article.
This translation is currently on my Wikipedia user page, as it was done as an academic work and will be graded soon. I hope to propose my translation as an official Wikipedia article once I have feedback on my academic work.
Poetry translation: William Keohane’s Other Men
As part of a poetry class, I produced a translation of Willam Keohane’s Other Men poem. This is a work describing the author’s transmasculine experience with periods written in a creative, rap-like style.
I particularly enjoyed working on this translation, because I find translation to be a delightful medium to use to bring more visibility to minoritised identities, and new perspective on mundane elements of life.
For this translation, I imposed on myself one key challenge: using only masculine nouns. As French is a language using two grammatical genders, all nouns fall either in the “masculine” or “feminine” category. While this poses a number of ethical challenges for translators, here, I decided to highlight the masculine element of the poem (which was very important to the author!) by only using that grammatical gender.
Working on this translation made me wish I had started doing more literary translations earlier– I find it very fun! Though I would not consider it a career pathway, I do look forward to finding other literary texts and poems to translate in my own time for my own enjoyment (I may post some of them here, stay tuned!).
Source text
Other Men
There are some days I taste the word ‘man’
its metallic rust inside my mouth and my body
tears the sound of it in two and throws it back
I bleed into my boxers slowly aching swallow
too much medication mimic men the way
they hide their pain I hide the pad
that does not fit but scrapes the fabric
hollow made for flesh I do not have I hide
the shame behind my tongue it sits it stays I hide
the hurt I hide the rage I hide behind the words
I choose ‘blood’ and nothing else
not ‘flow’ not ‘feminine’ not ‘period’
I hold the shame here on my tongue behind
the words that do not come I want to scream
that some men bleed and I am one
and I am one
Target text
Les Autres mecs
Il y a des jours où je goûte au mot « mec »
son oxyde métallique dans mon clapet dans mon corps
scinde son son en deux et le balance
moi je saigne dans mon boxer supplice silencieux j’avale
trop de médocs je fais comme les hommes
qui cachent leur mal moi je cache mon pad
qui rentre pas qui gratte le tissu
creusé pour le bout que moi j’ai pas moi je cache
l’opprobre sous ma langue il se pose il reste moi je cache
le mâl moi je cache le délire moi je me cache derrière les mots
j’ai dit « sang » et rien d’autre
c’est pas un « flux » c’est pas « féminin » c’est pas « menstruel »
je tiens l’embarras là sur ma langue derrière
les mots qui ne viennent pas moi je veux hurler
que y’a des hommes qui saignent et j’en suis un
et j’en suis un