Traduire la culture orale : quelques aspects liés à la traduction dans le contexte Amazighe
Authors: Outammat Sara 
Published: September 2023

Translating Oral Culture : Some Translation Aspects In The Amazigh Context

Orality is a field of research that is gaining perpetually popularity among ethnologists, and linguists. The status of oral literature is so particular. It is like the other side of written literature, its secret voice, its ignored or feared side. In North Africa, oral literature has always existed, circulated, and is still alive and often considered subversive. Also, it often plays a decisive role in the constitution of cultural identities. To preserve its identity, the Amazigh people have built and struggled for the survival of their oral tradition/culture in time and space. This ongoing struggle of researchers, activists, and academic institutions is based on repetition, transcription, and translation. This study deals with ethnographic texts (oral tales) according to a translatological approach specifically the translatability of cultural issues. To test the translatability of Amazigh oral culture, we opted for tales as a special genre compared to other oral literary genres. Its specificity lies in the fact that it survives through storytelling, represents a community/culture, and can house all other forms of oral literature such as riddles, proverbs, poems, etc. Our study corpus consists of 18 unpublished oral Amazigh tales collected in southeastern Morocco (Aoufous, Tafilalet). Thanks to recording equipment, we were able to record meetings with storytellers (of different ages, professions, and intellectual levels) in many real storytelling situations. This analysis uses concrete examples related to the performance aspect and the cultural background of the tales in question by submitting each example to an ethnological and stylistic analysis before moving on to its translatability. It shows a set of aspects that shape Amazigh oral tale characteristics and pose cultural, linguistic, and stylistic challenges to the transcriber-translator. This academic contribution aims to discuss two main points: Firstly, the fact of switching from the oral world to the writing world as the first level of translation given the difference in codes, language, style, conditions of storytelling, and audience. And secondly, the cultural challenges posed by the transition from an African/Morrocan to a European/French culture such as the non-equivalence in literary genres, polysemic terms, culturemes, puns, and other elements tracing the cultural realities contained in Amazigh oral tales. What we have sought to show in this reflection is that: if the written literary text imposes a set of rules on translators, and forces them to take into account its linguistic and extralinguistic specificities, the oral artistic production requires double attention before and during the translation operation because it reflects a whole culture using gestural and vocal performance in front of a specific audience. Any gesture, sound, or silence carries symbol and meaning. Nothing comes of chance when it comes to the oral tradition that reflects a common socio-cultural system and worldview. In this case, it is recommended not to lose sight of the fact that what is significant for a person belonging to the culture of departure may not necessarily be so for someone else belonging to the culture of arrival. To open the cultural portals of the tale, the translator must show flexibility ( when it’s about choosing the suitable translation technics), and avoid any form of ethnocentrism by taking into consideration two important elements: Cultural resistance (knowing how much the tale is rooted in one's own culture) and Cultural distance (Knowing what distance separates the source tale from the target tale). In order to avoid, as far