« The Figure of the Translator in Two Francophone African Classics”

International audience In a recent paper, following Andrew Chesterman’s suggestion, Lieven D’hulst examined a new branch in translation studies: the translator studies (D’hulst, 1). The main object of this new subfield would be to assemble all kinds of “research which focuses primarily and explicitly on the agents involved in translation, for instance on their activities or attitudes, their interaction with their social and technical environment, or their history and influence” (Chesterman, 20). In his theoretical overview of the works on the translator category, D’hulst observed that the current research on this topic follows two separate paths: “the first one looks at the way the translator is represented within fictional or autobiographical works”, while the second path “focuses on the discursive forms and functions taken by translational enunciation in translations by occupying their two main discursive spaces, i.e. the paratext (prologues, prefaces, postfaces, footnotes, etc.) and the translated text.” (D’hulst, 2015: 1). Our paper examines these two paths, taking the example of two francophone African classics: L’étrange Destin de Wangrin by Ahmadou Hampâté Bâ, which includes a representation of the interpreter in a colonial context, and Une vie de Boy by Ferdinand Oyono, that has been translated into fourteen languages, and, because of the specificities of the political and social histories of the countries, the translation inevitably evoked different associations among readers. Thus, the complexities of translating and the translator may be grasped, as may be exemplified by these two works of fiction.