Semantic, Stylistic and Language Variety Challenges in Translation Fidelity: A Case Study of the French Rendering of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy

Abstract

Abstract: This study examines translation fidelity in Pétit Minitaire, the French version of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy as rendered by Samuel Millogo and Amadou Missiri. The mixture of Nigerian pidgin, broken English, standard, and idiomatic English in which the original text is written is the key point that prompted my scientific interest. In the quest of checking the level of fidelity observed in rendering this « rotten English », [as the author claims] into French, Vinay and Darbelnet’s theory on comparative stylistics in general and more specifically the concept of translation units has been applied along with mixed method technique. For research purposes, the extract selected from the English version of the novel was segmented into 68 sentences and then distributed into 95 (43%) semantic units, 61 (27%) functional units, 41 (18.6%) dialectic units, 11 (5%) unified groups, 8 (3.6%) affinity groups, and 5 (2.3%) simple units. The results show that the translated version achieved through borrowing, adaptation, transposition, amplification, graphological deviation, and grammatical rephrasing, as well as some innovative linguistic patterns is mostly faithful to the source text, notwithstanding some rare cases of untranslated stylistic features and mistranslation. Keywords: Translation fidelity, Comparative stylistics, Units of translation, Sozaboy, Pétit Minitaire.