Oral Literature in French Translation: The Case of Yoruba Oriki and Its Communicative Challenges

The translation of Yoruba oriki, a complex genre of praise poetry with multilayered intertextual, performative, and cosmological dimensions, into French poses theoretical and methodological challenges that exceed conventional literary translation frameworks and require engagement with performance theory, ethnolinguistics, and oral literature scholarship. This study investigates the translation of Yoruba oriki into French, developing a theoretically grounded translation framework and evaluating its application through a corpus of original translations. The theoretical development integrates Zumthor's oral poetry theory, Venuti's translator invisibility critique, Tedlock's ethnopoetics, and postcolonial translation studies. A corpus of 45 oriki texts sourced from documented collections from Oyo, Ekiti, and Osun States was assembled, with contextual ethnographic documentation of performance contexts and intertextual references. Four bilingual Yoruba-French scholars produced translations of matched oriki subsets using four distinct translation strategies derived from the theoretical framework: phonological mimicry, semantic transparency, performative annotation, and intercultural mediation. The resulting translation corpus was evaluated by 24 expert assessors including Yoruba oral literature scholars and francophone African literature specialists, using a multi-criteria evaluation rubric. Results confirm that no single translation strategy is adequate across the full range of oriki types, and that performative annotation combined with intercultural mediation produces the highest combined fidelity and accessibility ratings for the widest range of oriki. The study provides the first comprehensive translation framework for Yoruba oral literature into French and produces a bilingual anthology of 30 translated oriki texts. Keywords: Yoruba oriki, French translation, oral literature, translation theory, ethnopoetics