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.

Source text | Target text

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.