Assessing the Translatability of Emotional Discourse in Djaïli Amadou Amal’s Munyal “Les Larmes de La Patience

Abstract

Human beings experience all sorts of emotions: sadness, fear, joy, anger, etc. which they communicate to their surrounding through language. As such, emotions are embedded in culture and thus differ from one person to another according to the cultural context and specific situations or events that trigger them. They can be expressed in action, for instance boxing in order to evacuate once anger, or in writing through language. Language is thus relevant for emotion and plays a key role in expressing emotions. There thus exists a close link between emotion and language. This partly explains why literary works, be it drama, prose or poetry are highly characterised by emotional discourse. This is because writers in order to educate, to sensitise, to entertain or to get the support of readers on an issue, evoke their emotions by the use of linguistic tools such as tone, diction, figurative languages, etc. However, despite the pervasiveness of emotions in literary texts, the translation of emotional discourse remains a challenging task. The reason being that, although emotions have been broadly searched in the domain of psychology, it remains under investigated in the domain of translation studies. As compared to other fields where the areas of investigation of emotions are types of emotions, emotions vocabulary in a specific culture, the measurement of the intensity of emotions, the cross-cultural similarities of emotion words, emotion meaning across culture, emotional problems, the manifestation of emotions, and so on, most translation scholars fail to investigate translation strategies which can be suitable to render emotions conveyed in a text. Some of these scholars limit themselves to the difficulties posed by the translation of emotions, and to finding equivalence in emotion words that exist between languages. This study thus aims at investigating translation strategies suitable to render the meaning of emotional discourse embedded in a literary work and their effects in the translation process, while focusing on the stylistic signals of emotions in a literary work more precisely in Djaïli Amadou Amal’s Munyal: Les Larmes de la Patience, and their translatability. It thus provides grounds for the translation of emotions, and comes up with translation strategies adapted for their translation. It also sheds light on what should be considered as the translation unit during their rendering. For this purpose, the emotions concerned in this study are anger, fear and sadness; and the selected emotional cultural phenomena dealt with in this research cut across borders. Besides, the study was grounded on the polysystem theory backed up by few literary and language theories. Also, it opted for a mixed approach. This approach enabled the collection of qualitative data through documentary research and textual analysis carried out both at the macro-textual level and at the micro-textual level; and quantitative data through statistics. The results of the investigation showed that stylistic signals of emotions in a literary text are dialogue, the author naming and describing emotions experienced by characters, characters’ choice of words, the description of characters’ facial expression, characters’ tone, the narrator tone and characters’ attitude. In addition to this, the study also revealed that translation strategies proposed by Chesterman (1997) more precisely literal translation, information change and explicitness change can be used to render the meaning of emotional discourse

embedded in a text. These strategies can also be combined and used. Furthermore, the investigations also highlighted that in translating emotional discourse, a translator can either be “source-oriented” or “target-oriented”; or both. Given that both source and target-oriented strategies were used. Besides, the results also showed that in translating emotional discourse the translator should take into account sentences in their entirety and not isolated terms.