Translating Igbo Proverbs into French: Challenges of Cultural Equivalence

Translation of Igbo oral literary forms, particularly proverbs, into French poses fundamental challenges of cultural equivalence, as proverbs are embedded in specific cosmological, social, and ecological contexts that resist direct structural or semantic transfer. This study investigates the challenges and strategies of translating Igbo proverbs into French, drawing on a corpus of 120 Igbo proverbs sourced from published Igbo literature and oral documentation projects. A comparative translation analysis methodology was applied, examining five existing French translations of Igbo literary works containing significant proverb density, supplemented by new translations produced by three bilingual Igbo-French translators under controlled conditions. Translators were instructed to apply domesticating, foreignising, and cultural substitution strategies to matched subsets of proverbs, generating a parallel corpus of strategic alternatives. Results identify cosmological referents, agricultural ecology, and kinship structure as the three most challenging cultural domains for Igbo-French proverb translation. Domesticating strategies that substituted French proverbial equivalents were judged most fluent by target-language readers but least culturally faithful by Igbo cultural experts. Foreignising strategies with explanatory footnotes preserved cultural specificity but disrupted narrative flow. A hybrid compensation strategy combining partial foreignisation with embedded contextual glossing emerged as the most widely supported approach among expert evaluators. The study provides theoretically grounded and practically applicable translation strategies for Igbo-French literary translation and contributes to the documentation of Igbo-French contact in translation studies. Keywords: Igbo proverbs, French translation, cultural equivalence, translation strategies, Igbo literature