Close or distant : Domestication or foreignization as a strategy when translating a text written in the Central African Republic from French to Swedish

This study examines the strategies used in the translation from French to Swedish of an academic text written in the Central African Republic. It focuses on the two opposing translation strategies of domestication and foreignization as described by Venuti (2017) and investigates whether Venuti’s theory about foreignization as a way of resisting racism and imperialism is applicable to translations beyond the literary field. The source text of the translation is written in a former colony, in the language of the ex-colonizer, which makes it particularly interesting in terms of cultural features and brings to the fore the need of taking aspects related to racist and imperialistic ideas into account. Based on an analysis of the translation situation, several features of the translated text are being examined with regards to translational choices connected to domestication and foreignization. The results show that even though both approaches are employed, domestication is clearly the dominating strategy, and this preference for domestication is often based on an effort to promote the content and the academic value of the source text. In other words: contrary to Venuti’s ideas, domestication rather than foreignization is used as a way of resisting racism and imperialism in this particular case. Because of the narrowness of the text material investigated, no general conclusions can be drawn from this study. Some suggestions are however made at the end about broadening the general translational research framework and blur the line between literal and non-literal translation, as proposed by Vandaele (2015), and about broadening and deepening the research on the translation of non-literary hybrid texts.