La traduction des documents authentiques dans les manuels scolaires Tunisiens entre pertinence et transgression linguistico-culturelle
Authors: Ochi Khaled 
Published: September 2023

The Translation of Authentic Documents in Tunisian School Textbooks between Relevance and Linguistic-Cultural Transgression

The didactics of foreign languages is a discipline that covers all teaching/learning operations and more particularly didactic transposition. This operational approach requires the presence of several actors: a learner who receives the knowledge and a teacher who plays a pedagogical role of mediator between the knowledge and the learner, using tools, and approaches adapted to the level of the learners. To succeed in this task, the teacher must select and prepare relevant authentic documents. In addition, he will try to plan the lessons and themes to be treated and select the accompanying resources in better working conditions (time/space).

The authentic document is a practical and tangible document that was not designed for pedagogical purposes but for communicative purposes. It is initially intended for native speakers; the teacher exploits it to enhance it in activities that he will propose in class. The authentic document can take various forms: written, oral, or audiovisual. But if it turns out that any change concerning the form and content has been made to the document such as the deletion or addition of one or more paragraphs, or their rhetorical flesh-out; or the addition of articulators between the proposals to facilitate for example the deduction, in this case we will rather speak of a manufactured didactic document.

Pedagogical resources play an important role in the teaching-learning process, since their content should improve learners' skill levels. In the context of the use of textbooks very strongly recommended by official instructions. The translation of authentic documents into mother tongues is undeniable, their relevance depends on the needs of the learners and therefore on the learning processes. On the other hand, the translation of these documents requires prior language skills and cultural knowledge on the part of translators-pedagogues but also learners, at the risk of being inappropriate or even counterproductive.

In fact, talking about relevance refers us to detecting the acts of receipt and authenticity of a document.  In class and in a well-defined production context, the authentic document is subject to different acceptance conditions. It is therefore necessary to prepare learners in advance to receive the translation of this document, so that they can grasp certain linguistic and contextual connivances.

However, the translation of authentic documents presents a large number of constraints that restrict the possibility of their use in the teaching-learning process. Moreover, it is not always easy to find relevant translations whose content is adapted to the level of learners cognitively and culturally, their relative ambiguities can be prohibitive at the beginner and intermediate levels. On the other hand, translations with simple proposals, stated at a concise and slow pace with a clear articulation will be perfectly preferred. It is also necessary that the translated content corresponds to the pedagogical challenges of the teacher and the needs of the learners.

This research deals with the translation of authentic documents into textbooks in Tunisia. It is an exploratory research with a comprehensive and analytical aim that relies on the quality of the texts produced in Arabic resulting from the translation of the source texts. It is objective to analyze the gap between the original texts in terms of authentic documents and their translation proposed in printed manuals. In particular, emphasis is placed on the linguistic-cultural relevance of translated texts and its relationship to the history of source texts. To achieve this objective, we opted for a tripartite analysis: The first part is a grammatical-comparative analysis of textual supports, the second part is a discursive and structural analysis of translated texts, while the last part, it focuses on the establishment and mobilization of cognitive and cultural baggage.