Patrick Chamoiseau’s mixed language in Texaco. An analysis of the strategies of its translation into Spanish

Abstract

This article deals with the difficulties that arise in the translation of the novel Texaco by Antillean writer Patrick Chamoiseau, who is well known because, in his writing, he sets in motion linguistic procedures that integrate orality and Creole speech into the French language. Texaco –published in France in 1992– tells the story of Martinique through three generations of slave Antilleans and their descendants. In his work, the author deploys numberless strategies, thus creating a mixed text where not only French and Créole are present, but also an interstitial space between both languages from where “Chamoisized” French –as named by Milan Kundera in 1991– would arise. By drifting away from canonical French, the author pursues the vindication of Antillean identity. In order to build our corpus, diverse linguistic recreation phenomena from the Creole substratum at a lexical, syntactic and orality-related level were selected. We then analyzed the translation techniques used in the Spanish edition (1994), by following Aixelá’s (1996) proposed classification. In said analysis we observed that, from a Bermanesque point of view, Texaco’s translation attempts to “shelter the foreign” by tending to emphasize the linguistic and cultural specificity of the original text (Berman, 1995).