Translation and use of the N... word in French: From Ten little niggers to They were ten
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2024.e94511Keywords:
Nigger/Nègre, lexical sociolinguistics, intralingual translation, retranslation, deconstruction of imaginariesAbstract
When the French retranslation of the novel Ten Little Niggers, by Agatha Christie, renamed They were ten, was published in 2020, the Christie Corporation declared that this new version of the work makes sense. According to the press release, in the century of the author the language was different. To question the validity of this argument, our study focuses on the translation and use of the term Nigger/Nègre (noun/adjective) in metropolitan French. The corpus is composed of the original work Ten Little Niggers (1939), its interlingual translation (1940) and retranslation (2020). These concepts are examined in the first part of the study in support of the theoretical bases of intertextuality. The second part follows the journey of the lexie in the United States, notably through the popularization of the original eponymous nursery rhyme. The third part aims to demonstrate that, like the sociolinguistic status of the N… word in the United States, the lexie Nègre/nègre has never integrated the usual vocabulary of French. These are all elements that make it possible to contest or even invalidate the argument presented by the author's heirs. The conclusion exposes the results of the CRAN/IPSOS discrimination barometer in France (2023) and underlines the need to deconstruct the institutionalized colonial imaginary.
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