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Article published In: Babel
Vol. 67:6 (2021) ► pp.730–757

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Translating official documents from French to English in Uganda

A sociolinguistic and pragmatic approach

 | Makerere University
Published online: 10 November 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00243.seb
Abstract
Although underexplored in Africa, the translation of official documents presents a revelatory context for examining translation practice and theory. Through a sociolinguistic and pragmatic lens, this study explores how translating official documents by focusing on linguistic equivalences without taking into account national institutional systems can be misleading. The argument is made that sociolinguistic variables and Grice’s pragmatic maxims are essential in enhancing translation effectiveness. A sample of 151 pairs of source and target documents dating from 2011–2017 was purposively selected. This corpus from nineteen Francophone countries covers three broad categories: Education, Legal, and General Administrative Correspondence. Nineteen translators and fourteen end-users were also interviewed regarding the translation effectiveness of corpus examples. Data is analyzed using sociolinguistic and pragmatic criteria. Finally, the analysis is positioned within the broader scholarship on translation studies to demonstrate how this approach expands our knowledge regarding effective translation.
Résumé
Bien que peu explorée en Afrique, la traduction de documents officiels offre un contexte révélateur pour l’examen des pratiques et de la théorie de la traduction. Dans une optique sociolinguistique et pragmatique, cette étude explore comment la traduction de documents officiels, en se concentrant sur les équivalences linguistiques sans tenir compte des systèmes institutionnels nationaux, peut être trompeuse. On fait valoir que les variables sociolinguistiques et les maximes pragmatiques de Grice sont essentielles pour améliorer l’efficacité de la traduction. Un échantillon de 151 paires de documents source et cible datant de 2011–2017 a été sélectionné à dessein. Ce corpus de 19 pays francophones comprend trois grandes catégories: documents académiques, juridiques et correspondance administrative générale. 19 traducteurs et 14 utilisateurs ont également été interrogés sur l’efficacité de la traduction des exemples tirés du corpus. Les données sont analysées à l’aide de critères sociolinguistiques et pragmatiques. Enfin, l’analyse s’inscrit dans le cadre plus vaste des études sur la traduction afin de démontrer en quoi cette approche élargit nos connaissances sur l’efficacité de la traduction.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Aims of the study and research questions
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Introduction/Title
      • 4.1.1Translation of government ministry names, logos, and postal addresses
        • 4.1.1.1Translation of administrative certificate names
    • 4.2Main body/statement
      • 4.2.1Translation of administrative divisions and officers
        • 4.2.1.1Translation of abbreviations
    • 4.3Pragmatic considerations
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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