La traduction naturelle chez les enfants fon de la République du Bénin.

Abstract

This thesis reports an experiment based on the concept of the child as natural translator, chiefly developed by Harris (1976-1980) and Malakoff (1991). Natural translation means translation done by bilinguals who have had no training for it. The medium used is oral translation in the form of consecutive interpretation from Fon--one of the most important vernaculars spoken in Benin (West Africa)--into French. The study centres on the translation of a folk tale. This Beninese tale is popular, of average length for its type, and was tape-recorded from a traditional Fon woman story-teller. It was translated by fifty bilingual boys and girls aged from 8 to 12 years, in schools at Cotonou. The children were therefore all at about the same level of age, culture, language and education. Twenty out of the fifty translation were transcribed in order to constitute a corpus. The hypothesis was that the children would not all translate in the same way: some would stay close to the wording of the source text, whereas others would use paraphrasing or adaptation techniques. This hypothesis is confirmed by the corpus with regard to close (or "exact") translations and adaptations, but the number of paraphrases is too insignificant to be taken into account. Furthermore, unlike the work of predecessors who studied either everyday conversations (Harris et al.), or standard translation exercises (Malakoff and Hakuta: 1991), in this study the subjects' interest was aroused by the use of an element of their education, that is to say the story-telling, the ludic, educational and entertainment fonctions of which helped to produce a relaxed atmosphere for the recordings. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)