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ABSTRACT
The inter-European language translator of post-independence African novels often faces considerably more challenges than the average literary translator. Many anglophone and francophone African novelists attempt to "decolonize" the colonial discourse, by resorting to a "subverted" version of the Europhone language: they tailor it to African reality and base it on the syntax, the lexicon, and the rhythm of their indigenous language. The translator of these texts tends to "normalize" the linguistic innovations of the source text, thus creating a smoother reading experience for the target audience. This paper examines Frank Wynne's translation into English of Allah n'est pas obligé, and in particular his handling of the most salient feature of the novel, the inclusion of some 350 "definitions" of "big words" that the narrator Birahima chooses from the four dictionaries bequeathed to him. A comparison of French and anglophone press reviews reveals that Wynne's translational choices have increased the "loudness" of the Ivorian author's voice among his anglophone readership.
Scholars and publishers of translations are well aware of the existing trade imbalance in translation: English is the language that is most often translated but the least translated into. According to the PEN/IRL report of 2007 on the international situation of literary translation a little over 2% of all fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999 consisted of translations.2 This ratio remains unchanged today (Allen 19). The total proportion of translated books published in the U.S., including nonfiction, has remained stable for decades at around 3%; foreign cultural institutions pithily refer to this situation as "the 3 percent problem" (Rohter 1).3 Allen also underscores the predicament of reviews and marketing that the translated book faces in the U.S. Publishers in the U.S. may well spend more than half a million dollars on the marketing-publicity and a book tour-for a promising first novel by an American writer (26); a foreign author releasing his/her first English translation rarely receives such marketing support. Larry Rohter of the New York Times writes in December 2010 that with the exception of the overwhelming successes, such as Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy, "winning the interest of big publishing houses and readers in the United States remains a steep uphill struggle" for contemporary fiction in translation (Rohter 1). However,...