Abstract

This thesis explores racial discourse in translation; using a semiotic approach, it demonstrates how racial discourse, characterized by a specific language, is subject to a "slippage of meaning" when translated into a target language. The example considered is a novel by Haitian writer Dany Laferrière, and its English translation by David Homel. Considering the widespread yet historically and scientifically discredited concept of "race", we will explore the impacts of translational displacements of meaning on Black identity. The "slippage of meaning", an unconscious "deformation" according to Berman's theory of ethnocentric and hypertextual translation, bears traces of a discourse, of an understanding of the world that can differ from the author's: "transformed" by the translator, "discourse" will be analysed in relation to Teun A. van Dijk's Critical Discourse Analysis. The works by Judith Lavoie and Hélène Buzelin will also be evoked in this research: their analyses of identity in the translation of vernaculars are of great relevance here.