Réflexions à l'usage des traducteurs d'œuvres autochtones écrites en anglais : pour une décolonisation de la traduction, suivies de "Le club des Premières Épouses : à la façon salishe de la côte" de Lee Maracle

Since the majority of Indigenous writers in North America write in English and since the majority of their translators are non-Indigenous, I started thinking about an ethical and decolonized translation, towards French, of Indigenous literary works written in English. The premise of this thesis is that a story written in English by an Indigenous author cannot be translated the same way a story written by a Canadian or American author is. This is explained by the fact that Indigenous literary works are often political, that their authors come from cultures and worldviews that are very different from the ones of western authors and that there is a power relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples. My reflection is based on the critical and theoretical work of certain western intellectuals, such as the translation scholar Antoine Berman, but mainly on the work of Indigenous writers, intellectuals, and scholars such as Craig S. Womack (Creek/Cherokee) and Kristina Fagan (Labrador Metis). In the first chapter of my thesis, I take an interest in the translation of literary works by Indigenous authors in Canada, in the two official languages. Since 2010, more and more Indigenous works have been translated, mostly from English to French. I study the political aspect of Indigenous stories and explain the aim of several Indigenous stories, which are healing, compassion, and reappropriation. I also draw attention to certain pitfalls that are often found in the translation of Indigenous literatures: ethnocentrism, rationalization, clarification, the “destruction of the vernacular networks”, and exoticisation which are, in the opinion of Berman, frequent “distorting tendencies” in translation. To these pitfalls, I add the desire to respond to the readers’ horizon of expectation, the lack of knowledge of Indigenous cultures, the desire to reveal everything, and the difficulty of translating Indigenous humour. I explore the relationship of Indigenous writers with the language of the colonizers before looking into Rez Englishes, these dialects that are found in some Indigenous works. In the second chapter, I highlight practical translation problems in two books of the Salish-Stó:lō author Lee Maracle as well as a few particularities of her writing. Finally, in the last chapter, I apply the result of my reflections to a translation of Maracle’s short story collection, First Wives Club: Coast Salish Style (2010), that is resolutely attached to the letter of the text

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