Abstract:
The work primarily centres on bilingual translation. That is, an effort to translate a source language into a target language expressing both the ideas and feelings of the writer. The two basic languages employed in the study are English and French. The documents are a report by West Africa Monetary Institute and a francophone monthly magazine on the military and defence in Africa. The essence is to make the texts available to francophone and anglophone readers to appreciate the efforts made by bilingual translators and further promote unity and co-existence.
In the process, there were such difficulties relating to semantics, thus, the problem of lexis and structure, as well as the given context and the prevailing circumstance. Appropriate methodology was therefore required to be able to overcome the challenges.
With regard to methodology, sentences are translated one after the other by sub-dividing them into units, that is, ‘le découpage’. This is followed by analysis of the grammatical structure of the sentence. What we note here is ‘réseaux de signification’, thus, the basic meaning of the text. Paraphrasing of the original work is done for the possibility of transposition that conforms to the characteristics of the target language. This is followed among others by ‘recomposition’, ‘étoffement’ and ‘adaptation’. It should however be noted that all these elements are complementary and that they are all employed in order to lay bare the ideas and feelings of the writers and thus remain faithful to the original work. It is expected that the final work would be understood by any reader who has no fore-knowledge of the source text.
