English has many variants due to geographical, cultural and historical factors. The most common variants of English are British English and American English, however, there are many more variants of the language. We are going to focus on one of the best known and most controversial dialects of English, spoken in the United States, African American Vernacular English (AAVE) or Black English.

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a variety of American English spoken by 80% of the black community in the USA. AAVE originated on plantations in the southern United States, where Africans were enslaved for labour. From a historical point of view, Black English is the most complex of the American social dialects, it has structural and historical similarities with certain varieties of English spoken in the Caribbean, South America, West Coast of Africa and the Pacific.

Black English has syntactic, semantic and phonological peculiarities that make it the most homogeneous dialect of American English, which, given the linguistic and cultural solidarity of the black community due to its special social situation in the USA, gives this dialect such importance that it has led to the possibility of this nation becoming a bidialectal country in the near future.

Black English’s Characteristics

Black English is notable for the followings:

Black English does not normally use the -s of the 3rd person singular. In addition, it should be noted that the tense is optional in verbs, the only thing that is required is to mark whether the action is progressive or not. The absence of a verb is another very characteristic marking.

On the other hand, it is worth mentioning that the “existential subject” “there” constantly disappears, and that one of the most typical and well-known marks of this dialect is the use of the double negation.

In addition, Black English has the tendency to maintain the declarative syntactic order for interrogatives, so that it is the intonation which alone executes the question. Also, if the noun is accompanied by an expression which already carries a plural meaning, it will invariably remain in the singular, but if there is no plural marking nearby, the noun will adopt the morpheme -s.

The inventory of prepositions is the same as in Standard English but their distribution varies. Black English relative clauses are often inserted into the main sentence without any relative pronouns. Moreover, the pronoun system is totally relaxed in Black English.

Besides, one of the most important features of this dialect is the frequency of the pleonastic pronoun as subject.

A Prejudiced Dialect

But above all, the most striking feature about Black English is the prejudice that this dialect carries with it. Speakers of this dialect, often considered inappropriate or inferior, suffer discrimination simply because they speak it. Members of the majority culture, who would be willing to accept and defend equality in other domains, continue to reject the legitimacy of Black English over Standard English…. This phenomenon can be called language-based racism and has resulted in speakers of this dialect being silenced and disrespected in places dominated by Standard American English.

The syntactic, semantic and phonological peculiarities of Black English make it the most homogeneous and complex of all American dialects, and its cultural and social importance is so great that its translation becomes an extremely difficult task.

Black English in Literature

This ill reputation is a plain proof of the reason why Black English needs some proper representation in medias and in translation, but in practice, how does that work? How does a translator alter linguistic norms in order to preserve the cultural and stylistic significance of a source text without creating a stereotypical and harmful representation of its dialect?

The duty of a translator does not only entail sharing the information conveyed by the source text with as much accuracy as possible, but also of preserving the intention and tone of it. With that in mind, toning down or even completely erasing Black English from a character’s speech would not only be a properly unsatisfactory strategy, but is also a neutralization of the black voice considered as “ethnocentric” by the French writer Bernard Vidal. Such strategy was adopted during the early days of literary translation for Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). In order to avoid the controversy the writer found himself in because of his stereotypical depiction of a character called Jim, translators decided to standardize his dialect, thus making a fugitive slave share the same high-brow speech-pattern as a wealthy one.

Here, the neutralization of the character’s dialect can be justified by the lack of authenticity of the original source text. Even though Mark Twain had done dialectal research, he wasn’t legitimate in his attempt to reproduce a Missouri African American dialect and therefore any translation issued from his work was merely a representation of a faulty portrayal.

Strategies of translation

Now, in the case where the source text was actually written by a black person, what translation strategy could be put into place without standardizing the speech pattern?

An interesting case was Brodsky’s translation of the novel Une femme noire written by the African American author Zora Neale Hurston. Instead of settling for a standardization or a word-for-word translation, Françoise Brodsky framed her translation around what the dialect actually sounded like. She analyzed the dialect, tried to get a deeper understanding of it by finding out its main characteristics, and then attempted to recreate those defining features in another language. This strategy led her to focus on what seemed to strike her the most with Black English – the rhythm and the fluidity of the dialogues. In order to preserve that rhythm in the target language, she avoided commas and apostrophes by replacing them with many contractions (“jsuis” instead of “je suis”), or dashes when necessary (“c-que” instead of “ce que”). She also strayed away from any negative, subjunctive or genitive, but especially, she found a way to preserve what is called the “Perfective Done”.

In a crafty demonstration of how crucial creativity is in a translator’s set of skills, Brodsky decided to use repetitions to replace the “Perfective Done”, thus attempting to recreate the sound of phrasing such as “I done scorched up my meat” through redundancy. Thus, sentences such as “the youngun had done got over de fence” were translated by “lgamin avait sauté-franchi la clôture” (“the kid had jumped-crossed the fence”).

Such strategies are a good portrayal of what transcreation represents in the translation process, and how there’s no such thing as a subjectively correct translation.

If you wish to know more about transcreation, more precisely about our transcreation services, you can reach out to us here!

Also, if you want to know more about Black English, here’s a great TED Talk about it!