Kulturelle Missverständnisse in der Übersetzung französischer Migrationsliteratur

Abstract The translation of migration literature is a particular challenge for translators. In this contribution, I shall explore the English and German translations of Faïza Guène’s novel Kiffe kiffe demain , Alain Mabanckou’s Black Bazar and Fatou Diome’s Le ventre de l’Atlantique. In this context, I will discuss the different choices made by the translators and analyse how they manage to avoid cultural misunderstandings, how they fall prey to cultural misunderstandings or how they generate cultural misunderstandings in their own translation. The task of translating references to a specific migrant sub-culture is particularly demanding when the latter does not exist in the culture of the target text. Due to France’s colonial history, a strong presence of citizens from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa can be observed in different parts of the country, which is not the case in Germany or in the UK. Thus, the translators have to act as cultural mediators in order to communicate a specific cultural environment to a German-speaking and Anglophone readership, which might not be familiar with the functioning of certain a milieu of French society.