Translating Nigerian Political Discourse into French: Challenges and Strategies in Media Contexts

The translation of Nigerian political discourse into French for international media audiences involves complex challenges of lexical, cultural, and pragmatic equivalence, given the distinctive characteristics of Nigerian political language including pidgin insertions, ethnic proverbs, and context-specific political terms. This study investigates the challenges and strategies employed in translating Nigerian political discourse into French in the context of international broadcasting, particularly Africa No. 1, Radio France Internationale, and TV5 Monde Africa programmes. A translation process and product research design was employed, combining corpus analysis of 120 translated political speech excerpts with think-aloud protocol data from six professional translators working on Nigerian political texts. The corpus covered election campaign speeches, National Assembly floor debates, and presidential press conference excerpts from 2019 to 2023. Translation challenges were classified by type, and strategy patterns were identified through qualitative coding of think-aloud data. Results identify cultural untranslatability of Yoruba and Igbo political proverbs, pragmatic softening of confrontational Hausa political idioms, and terminology gaps for Nigerian-specific constitutional and electoral institutions as the three most frequent challenge categories. Translators predominantly adopted combination strategies blending partial foreignisation with contextual explanation. Pidgin-English insertions were handled through omission in 68% of cases, resulting in pragmatic information loss. The study recommends development of a Nigerian political discourse glossary in French for use by professional translators and international media agencies. Keywords: translation, Nigerian political discourse, French media, translation strategies, cross-cultural communication