Prosper NONGNIDE is from Benin Republic in West Africa. He holds a Master of Divinity degree in translation studies from Africa International University in Kenya. He works with Wycliffe Benin as translation consultant and translation coordinator. He also serves as Global partnership field coordinator of Wycliffe USA for Benin and Togo. He is married to Catherine and they have three children
The Phenomenon of Linguistics Decalcomania in Bible Translation: Case Study in Some Selected Target Languages of Benin and Togo.
Abstract
In most translation teams in French-speaking countries in Africa, the source text from which the translation is done is the French versions of the Bible. As a result, the translation done in the target languages are very much influenced by the French language structure. In order words, the translators are victims of a tracing tendency and therefore decal the grammatical structures and collocations of the French language into their translations. This “loan-translation” phenomenon is what we try to describe in this paper as “linguistics decalcomania”.
Jan de Waard-Eugene A. Nida (2003) have also raised this “linguistics decalcomania” problem in Bible translation in their book entitled “D’une langue Ă une autre”. For these authors, when translating, if the translator only reproduces the “literal meaning” by decaling or tracing the original form into the target language, the receptors will be surprised to get other meaning than the one intended by the author of the original language.