Aspects of Textuality in the French Translation of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
Aspects of Textuality in the French Translation of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Summary/Abstract: The search for equivalence in translation from the cultural and stylistic point of view constitutes a problem in literary translation. This paper analyses Michel Ligny’s translation of Achebe’s text into English. This paper analyses the transfer of textual, cultural, historical and sociological concepts as well as acceptability in the target language in terms of norms that constitute a narrative of history. The paper adopts the new historicism as a conceptual framework, which considers history as a type of narrative whose existence is closely related to its textuality. The comparative analysis of the source and the target text reveals that full translation equivalence is achievable through proper understanding of the linguistic and cultural features of Things Fall Apart. The paper concludes that the translation of African literary texts should be carried out through adequate knowledge of African language and culture so as to take into account cultural, linguistic and sociological concepts of the original text in the target text.

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