PARLERS HYBRIDES EN TRADUCTION : L'EXEMPLE DU CHIAC ET DU CAMFRANGLAIS

Abstract

This thesis analyzes some theoretical and practical problems of the translation of Chiac and Camfranglais, as well as the strategies used by translators to solve these problems. It is based on a number of translation principles that these types of languages present major challenges due to their status as vernaculars and their inherent linguistic hybridity. This work attempts to answer the following questions: what are the translation problems posed by Camfranglais and Chiac as a whole, and linguistically and culturally heterogeneous texts in particular? What are the translation strategies used in order to find solutions to these issues? These questions imply that translating Chiac and Camfranglais is not an easy task. Although the hybrid nature of these languages and their linguistic status as vernaculars make them hard to translate, there are ways of overcoming such difficulties. This study, which falls within the general framework of postcolonial translation theory, draws on data consisting of both literary and non-literary texts. The former include most of the literary production of Acadian writers who have used Chiac in their works whose translated versions are available in English, while the latter encompass Chiac and Camfranglais excerpts from monolingual corpora, as well as bilingual parallel corpora (Chiac-French, Camfranglais-French, Chiac-English and Camfranglais-English) culled from blogs, online chat forums, sociolinguistic surveys, and popular culture texts. The analysis of the translation strategies used in the aforementioned language pairs was inspired by a comparative and contrastive approach. Likewise, some translation premises and principles such as the definition of translation, the postcolonial translation theory, the ethics of translation are reassessed and critiqued in a well-balanced way. Lastly, this work reveals, among other things, that not only are the Chiac and Camfranglais hybrid vernaculars translatable, but also, several of the strategies used to translate them intersect with those employed for the translation of the so-called “cultivated’’ languages.