الترجمة الذاتية وإشكالية نقل الخصوصيات الثقافية

Abstract

Self – translation is an exceptional translation activity which is defined as being the translation made by the author of the original text. A linguistic phenomenon which is Translingualism has given birth to this kind of translation activity, after the colonisation movement that affected some countries in the modern world; a new generation of bilingual writers appeared who wrote their works using two different languages reflecting two far cultures. The Maghreb Literature is known for being a French literature, and if we take the Algerian literature as an example, we notice that majority of authors wrote their works in French, a language that has been imposed on them by the French occupation which made all its efforts to prohibit the use of Arabic as a language of education in schools, aiming at the eradication of the basis of the Algerian people identity. Hence, the Algerian authors wrote in French and tried to transmit the sufferings and the bitter real- life of the Algerians using the language of Voltaire, that language was of such a perfection that seemed to be their mother tongue, the fact that incited them to use it as a means enabling them to confirm their belonging and to prove their identity. Starting from their Bilingualism, many authors have chosen the translation of their works into Arabic for their Arab readers in the scope of self-translation that raises many problems in the field of translation studies because “ Me” and the “Other” are the same person the fact that involves social, cultural and psychological features that intervene while achieving the self-translation act. Incontestably, the self-translator is a privileged translator enjoying of an absolute freedom being the Owner of the original text and the best interpreter of the author’s intentions ( himself ), this authority gives him the right to make some modifications to his original text (additions, omissions, substitutions, transpositions…) notably while translating cultural facts by which his society is distinguished. As we all know, the transfer of the cultural specificities imposes many challenges for all the translators – either ordinary ones or self-translators -mainly when the source text is historically and culturally far from the target one. In self-translation, the problem becomes more important since the spirit of the self-translator balances between two different worlds and two distinct cultures, the fact that obliges him to pursue divers translation methods: sometimes he adopts domesticating strategies and other times he uses foreignizing ones, having as an only objective the production of a clear text and easy to understand in the target language for the reader.