أطراس
Volume 7, Numéro 1, Pages 389-402
2026-01-15
Cross-border Translation Of Academic Documents: A Comparative Analysis Of French–english And Ugandan Retranslations
Authors : Sebuyungo Enoch .
Abstract
Although underexplored in Africa, cross-border translation of academic documents is vital for examining translation practice and theory. Through a Skopos theoretical lens, this study analyses the Ugandan retranslation into English of academic documents in French that have been translated into English from their source francophone countries. The objectives include examining lexical, syntactic, and stylistic variations in the translations and retranslations of academic documents; identifying sociocultural factors that influence translation decisions as well as best practices for cross-border academic document translation. It is argued that a functionalist approach is essential in enabling translators to assimilate source text to receiving cultural values and ensure that the message resonates with the target audience. A sample of 18 source, translated and retranslated documents dating from 2001-2022 was purposively selected. The corpus from three francophone countries covers school certificates, academic transcripts and degree certificates. Five translators and six administrator end-users were also interviewed regarding translation effectiveness of corpus examples. The insights from these reflections show that the francophone source country translations tended to be excessively source-oriented, prioritizing literal fidelity over the communicative needs of Ugandan administrative systems which can best be understood by target country translators. The Ugandan retranslations are target-oriented and align with the Skopos theory to produce functional translations aligned with the expectations of educational administrators who make decisions regarding student academic documents.
Keywords
academic documents ; cross-border translation ; skopos ; functionalist approach ; French ; English
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