Vers quel modèle de traduction-terminologie en langues nationales à l’aune d’une éducation bi- plurilingue au Cameroun ?

Abstract

Towards what model of translation-terminology in national languages in the light of bi-plurilingual education in Cameroon?

Cameroon, a country characterised by obvious linguistic diversity, recognises the importance of education that is rooted in the culture of the pupils and develops professional or self-employment skills through bi-lingual education. However, the national languages of Cameroon do not have sufficiently elaborate metalanguages to fully convey all the knowledge related to school subjects such as grammar, arithmetic, geometry, etc. They therefore need to be developed and adapted to the needs of the students. They need to be equipped with adequate terminologies to meet the challenge of bi-plurilingual teaching (official languages and national languages), because the production of bi-plurilingual (Cameroonian languages and official languages: French and English) teaching manuals and metalinguistic tools (lexicons, dictionaries, etc.), among others, implies an intense activity of translation-terminology to express certain teaching contents. However, no standard theoretical-practical model has been adopted for translation- terminology involving these languages. This activity thus seems to be left to improvisation. Focusing on recent work in two terminology committees in Cameroon (the ELAN- Afrique committee and the one set up by the IFADEM-RETHE team in Cameroon in 2016), this article outlines some of the salient linguistic problems encountered in translation-terminology activities related to the elaboration of lexicons in national languages, in the perspective of bi-lingual education. These include problems relating to the order of priority in the choice of naming procedures, compliance with the rules of adaptation of borrowings, the length of lexicalised expressions, and the rate of translation of terms. With regard to the choice of naming procedures, certain notions were difficult to agree on and were sometimes the source of lengthy debates within the translation-terminology groups. For example, in view of the high level of abstraction of certain concepts, some members of the terminology committees proposed borrowing as a first recourse, while others, with a purist tendency, considered that procedures employing the internal resources of the target language should be preferred to borrowing, without taking into account the length of the lexemes that would be derived from them. As far as compliance with the rules of adaptation of borrowings is concerned, several terms are not morpho-phonologically adapted, contrary to what is recommended by the cultural approaches. Moreover, several graphemes and consonantal sequences not attested in the alphabet or in the morphophonology of certain languages have been disgracefully taken into account in lexicons. Furthermore, as regards the length of lexicalised expressions, several terms have been translated into excessively long syntagms, or even sentences, whereas several procedures could have allowed their lexicalisation in compliance with the principle of brevity dear to terminology. Finally, some terms, due to their high level of abstraction or technicality, remained untranslated. In addition, the study proposes some theoretical-practical issues in the perspective of a model of translation-terminology of school contents from the official languages into the national languages of Cameroon, by laying the groundwork for an extensive socio-cultural terminological approach that would not only preserve the identity needs of each local community (hence the socio-cultural component of the model), but would also take into account the linguistic and cultural diversity of Cameroon characterised by the other idioms that evolve in this territory with the cultures they convey (hence the extensive character of the model). It is a non-essentialist model in its socio-cultural dimension, which promotes the multidialectal and multilingual character of the territory in translation-terminology activities by encouraging and highlighting the lexical variations that could arise from the different linguistic variants within a single language, as well as the calques and borrowings between Cameroonian languages; this with a view to increasing the possibilities of terminological development.