Translating Vulnerable Voices into French: The Child Narrators in Emma Donoghue's Room and Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English
Translating Vulnerable Voices into French: The Child Narrators in Emma Donoghue's Room and Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with two child narrators: Emma Donoghue’s 5-year-old Jack (Room, 2010) and Stephen Kelman’s 11-year-old Harrison Opoku (Pigeon English, 2011). Jack’s voice delivers the tale of a life spent in captivity in a garden shed. His peculiar voice and mind style challenge both the language use and the world view of the adult readers for whom Donoghue wrote Room. Harrison’s narrative voice is Kelman’s recreation of a silenced voice, that of a Ghanaian immigrant child who discovers England. His creolized language also offers a decentered perspective on the world that surrounds him. These youthful voices - at once vulnerable and resilient - unravel their stories with striking linguistic inventiveness. Donoghue and Kelman were both praised for their ability to create the “authentic” child-like narrative voices of modern-day Tom Sawyers. What in Jack’s and Harrison’s voices and highly original narrative style is vulnerable to translation? Rewriting such novels in French is a linguistic and cross-cultural challenge: what pitfalls and lurking dangers can jeopardize the translation process when it comes to recreating a juvenile voice? The translators had to be both faithful to the source text and creative. They also needed pay close attention to tone, register and verisimilitude so that the French-speaking narrators of Room and Le Pigeon Anglais would catch and retain their adult readers’ attention with the same end earing and powerful enthusiasm that resonates in the source texts. Coupled with a prospective study of style in the source texts, the approach taken to try and answer these questions is retrospective in so far as party draws upon the translator’s reflective analysis of one of her own published translations. This analysis is nurtured by theoretical readings and seeks to reach across to another translator’s work.

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