Questions Related to the Temporality of Minority Languages and Linguistic Varieties

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss the concept of minority languages and the time when they started emerging in translation. Indeed, minority languages became a central issue at the end of the colonial era thanks to a number of institutional policies and political movements aimed at giving a voice to people who did not have a say for a number of reasons. The growing interest in these minority languages opened up a new avenue in terms of cultural exchanges and representation in translation. Nowadays translators have to cope with what some authors have rightly called the cultural turn which exposes them to a multiplicity of international human and social experience evolving across continents. Michael Cronin, Susan Bassnett and other authors have admitted that translators mediate through cultures and languages. Furthermore, the languages of the former colonisers, i.e. English and French, have also been the subject of variations in the sense that new world views, idioms, phrases, proverbs and uses have emerged here and there in both Anglophone and Francophone countries and translators are constantly called upon to give them a “new life in another language and culture”. The methodology of the paper is both descriptive and analytical. In this logic, examples of “different” uses of both English and French in linguistic practices overseas will be given and analysed from cultural, temporal, social, philosophical, stylistic, semantic and lexical points of view. As a result, linguistic varieties and transformations have created a new situation whereby the languages of the former colonisers are just like “variables” with many “variants” around the globe. Two dimensions of translation, i.e. intra-lingual and extra-lingual translation, come into play. From another point of view, ethnic minority groups, the youth and immigrants also contribute to broadening the scope of minority languages and linguistic varieties.