Representing alterity in a post-colonial context: Lídia Jorge’s A costa dos murmúrios and its english and french translations

Abstract

This article explores two translations of Lídia Jorge’s A costa dos murmúrios (1988), published in France (1989) and in the United States (1995). Translated from a peripheral language into central languages and dominant cultural systems, this novel about the Portuguese colonial war in Africa had contrasting receptions in those countries, which point to different approaches to its translation. This study sets out to identify the main agents and external factors involved in the translation process and to determine the role that issues of patronage, the national translation tradition and the national history of both receiving cultures play in it. With these questions in mind, the focus will then turn to the way the colonized people and their culture are represented in the novel, to verify whether or not there was a tendency, in translating, to replace non-Western cultural references with more widespread forms of representation.