Table of Contents
Greener Journal of Art and Humanities
Vol. 11(1), pp. 53-68, 2026
ISSN: 2276-7819
Copyright ©2026, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.
https://gjournals.org/GJAH
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15580/gjah.2026.1.062426096
1 University of Bamenda, Cameroon. Email: denselnorise@gmail.com
2 University of Bamenda, Cameroon. Email: juliuschenwi08@gmail.com
3 University of Buea, Cameroon. Email: ayonghelumsuzanne@gmail.com
Type: Research
Full Text: PDF, PHP, HTML, EPUB, MP3
DOI: 10.15580/gjah.2026.1.062426096
Accepted: 27/06/2026
Published: 29/06/2026
Densel Norris Bidbila
University of Bamenda, Cameroon.
E-mail: denselnorise@gmail.com
Keywords: Camfranglais, linguistic hybridity, communicative translation, modulation, postcolonial translation, Cameroon
This paper addresses the core problem that conventional literal translation methods and standard formal dictionaries are fundamentally inadequate for rendering culturally dense linguistic hybridity into English, as literalism results in either semantic opacity or the complete erasure of postcolonial translation specificity and local Cameroon identity. The primary objective of this study is to systematically evaluate a structured repertoire of translation decisions within the framework of communicative translation theory to determine the most effective mechanism for transferring these expressions to an English-speaking Cameroonian audience. To achieve this, the article is guided by a straightforward central question: which specific translation strategy and particularly focusing on the utility of modulation, can successfully carry the cultural density, humour, and pragmatic force embedded in Mercedes Fouda’s written Camfranglais into English without sacrificing target-reader intelligibility or stripping away the local symbolic voice?
Cet article aborde le problème central selon lequel les méthodes de traduction littérale conventionnelles et les dictionnaires formels standard s’avèrent fondamentalement inadéquats pour rendre en anglais l’hybridité linguistique à forte charge culturelle, le littéralisme entraînant soit une opacité sémantique, soit l’effacement complet de la spécificité de la traduction postcoloniale et de l’identité locale camerounaise. L’objectif principal de cette étude est d’évaluer systématiquement un répertoire structuré de choix traductifs dans le cadre de la théorie de la traduction communicative, afin de déterminer le mécanisme le plus efficace pour transmettre ces expressions à un public camerounais anglophone. Pour y parvenir, l’article s’articule autour d’une question centrale simple : quelle stratégie de traduction spécifique et mettant particulièrement l’accent sur l’utilité de la modulation, peut réussir à transposer en anglais la densité culturelle, l’humour et la force pragmatique inhérents au Camfranglais écrit de Mercedes Fouda, sans sacrifier la compréhensibilité pour le lecteur cible ni vider de sa substance la voix symbolique locale ?
Cameroon presents one of the most dynamic language-contact environments on the African continent. Alongside the country’s two official colonial languages, English and French, 240 to 280 indigenous languages and powerful contact varieties such as Cameroon Pidgin English continue to shape everyday communication. In such a multilingual ecology, hybrid forms do not arise at the margins alone; they occupy the center of lived social interaction. UNESCO’s 1982 Mexico City Declaration remains useful here because it defines culture as a broad ensemble of symbolic, material, intellectual, and affective features through which societies recognize themselves and organize meaning. In Cameroon, language is one of the most visible places where this cultural self-recognition happens.
Camfranglais is one of the clearest manifestations of linguistic hybridity. Kouega (2003) describes Camfranglais as a composite slang used by young Cameroonians and built out of French, English, Pidgin, and indigenous-language resources. More recent work by Kießling (2021) shows that Camfranglais cannot be reduced to a decorative lexicon appended to standard French; it exhibits a deeper grammatical hybridity and indexes solidarity, progressiveness, and cosmopolitan Cameroonian identity. Ebongue (2023) further demonstrates that written Camfranglais is patterned and stratified rather than random, especially in the productions of educated users. What emerges from these scholars is that hybridity in Cameroon is not linguistic accident. It is social style, ideological positioning, and cultural memory at once.
Mercedes Fouda’s Je parle Camerounais pour un renouveau francofaune is a privileged site for observing this phenomenon. Published by Karthala in 2001, the text does not merely record colorful speech; it dramatizes how Cameroonians bend French into a locally meaningful medium. The book is humorous, satirical, and richly idiomatic. Expressions like ami de bière, deuxième bureau, kongossa, Mamie taro pilé, and tombé sans glisser do not function as isolated lexical curiosities. They condense social relations, urban precarity, gendered power, pragmatic nuance, and embodied local knowledge. To translate such expressions into English is therefore not to replace one word with another. It is to decide what must be clarified, what may be retained, and what kind of reader the translation imagines.
Translation in this article is understood as cultural mediation. Newmark’s A Textbook of Translation (1988) is central because it distinguishes communicative translation from more source-bound procedures. Communicative translation aims at producing an effect on the target audience comparable to that of the source text on its readership. Nida’s work is equally important in placing emphasis on intelligibility, receptor response, and the communicative situation of translation. His insistence that translating means communicating remains particularly relevant in multilingual African settings where the issue is not only linguistic transfer but the social conditions under which meaning becomes shareable.
Communicative translation is especially attractive for Fouda’s text because many expressions in the corpus are intelligible only to insiders familiar with urban Cameroonian speech and social practice. A translation that clings mechanically to surface form may retain lexical strangeness, but it will often fail to transmit the intended pragmatic effect. When mouiller la gorge is rendered literally as “wet the throat,” the reader may understand the words but miss the convivial invitation encoded in the expression. A communicative rendering such as “have a drink first” reproduces the social function more effectively.
Yet communicative translation by itself is not enough. If it is interpreted narrowly as pure fluency, it risks domesticating away the foreignness that gives hybrid expressions their political and cultural value. The present article therefore treats communicative translation not as a mandate for neutralization but as a flexible reader-oriented approach that must be balanced with cultural retention. At the micro level, this article draws on procedures such as modulation, borrowing, amplification, cultural substitution, and compensation. Modulation is particularly important because it allows the translator to shift perspective while preserving intended sense. Borrowing becomes useful when a source term carries strong cultural identity and should remain visible. Amplification helps when a concise source expression needs extra contextual support in English. The broader thesis shows that these strategies are not applied randomly but according to the social load of each expression. The article is organized into five main parts: literature review, theoretical framework, methodology, results and discussions followed by a conclusion and references.
This section revisits the conceptual and empirical literature most relevant to the translation of Cameroonian hybrid language. It first clarifies the notions of hybridity, Camfranglais, and communicative translation before reviewing scholarship on hybrid discourse and its translation.
Empirical Review
Kouega (2003) seminal description of Camfranglais as a composite slang remains foundational because it identifies the speech form’s mixed lexical sources and its use among youth as a code of in-group belonging. Kießling (2021) complicates this earlier view by arguing that Camfranglais may not simply graft vocabulary onto a French matrix; rather, it displays forms of grammatical hybridity whose structure cannot be entirely reduced to standard French. This matters for translation because the translator is not dealing with a few anomalous words inside an otherwise stable code. The translator is dealing with a culturally and structurally hybrid discourse world.
Ebongue (2023) is particularly helpful for the present study because he shifts attention from oral Camfranglais to written Camfranglais. He shows that written camfranglais vary according to speaker profile and level of education, but they are sufficiently patterned to warrant systematic analysis. Fouda’s text belongs precisely to this written domain. It stylizes speech without merely transcribing it, which means that the hybrid forms are both sociolinguistic facts and literary choices. Their translation must therefore respond to both levels.
Ubanako (2021) reviews the debate over whether Camfranglais should be classified as a language in its own right or as a new speech form on a continuum with other Cameroonian contact varieties. For this article, the taxonomic question is less decisive than the translational implication: whether one calls it a language, a youth variety, or a hybrid sociolect, Camfranglais carries social meanings that cannot be preserved through denotational equivalence alone.
Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework of this article is centered on communicative translation theory and complemented by postcolonial translation theory (Newmark, 1988). The first provides a model for reader-oriented transfer; the second prevents that model from collapsing into cultural erasure.
Communicative Translation Theory
Newmark’s (1988) communicative translation theory is appropriate for this study because the target readership is clearly defined: English-speaking Cameroonians who may share the national cultural environment but not necessarily the same hybrid Franco-Cameroonian lexical repertoire as Fouda’s primary readership. The aim of the translation is therefore not to produce a philological document but to make the expressions function meaningfully for a cognate but distinct audience. In this framework, successful translation depends less on lexical fidelity than on equivalent communicative impact.
This does not mean that form is irrelevant. In many instances the stylistic color of Fouda’s expressions contributes directly to meaning. What communicative translation permits is a strategic rebalancing: when the surface form obstructs comprehension, the translator may reshape it in order to preserve its effect. This is why modulation emerges so strongly in the wider corpus. Hybrid expressions often need to be recast from literal image to culturally intelligible sense.
Domestication, Foreignization and Postcolonial Mediation
Venuti (1995) critique of fluent domestication is especially relevant because hybrid African texts are often pressured into conformity with metropolitan norms. If every Cameroonian expression is naturalized into a smooth and generic English equivalent, the translation may become readable but politically bland. Bhabha’s (1994) notion of hybridity helps resist this flattening by insisting that mixed forms are themselves productive cultural sites.
The position adopted here is therefore a mediated one. The translation should domesticate when comprehension genuinely requires it, but foreignize selectively when the local term itself is part of the meaning. The wider corpus results support this compromise: domestication predominates overall, but foreignization remains necessary in a meaningful minority of cases. This balance allows the target text to speak clearly without pretending that it was born in monolingual English.
The population of study includes hybrid expressions occurring in Fouda’s text as well as Cameroonian readers capable of evaluating the proposed English translations. The textual population is particularly relevant because Fouda’s work presents hybridity not in scattered incidental forms but as a sustained discourse practice. The human population is equally important because the research seeks to know whether the proposed translations remain meaningful for English-speaking Cameroonians.
The broader study purposively selected one hundred hybrid expressions from Je parle Camerounais pour un renouveau francofaune. These one hundred items were distributed evenly across four sub-domains: social relations and interpersonal structures, economic life and survival strategies, urban youth culture and identity construction, and discourse, pragmatics and figurative expression. In addition, twenty-five participants were selected from two broad categories: translation and linguistics professionals on the one hand, and Cameroonian lay readers familiar with everyday hybrid speech on the other. Each participant evaluated ten translated expressions randomly drawn from the wider corpus.
Data were collected through three complementary channels. First, documentary data were extracted from Fouda’s text and organized into a translatability grid. Second, participants responded to a questionnaire designed to test clarity, cultural resonance, identity preservation, and perceived strategy effectiveness. Third, semi-structured interviews provided interpretive depth by allowing respondents to discuss why some translations felt more natural or more faithful than others.
Table 1: The principal instrument is the translatability grid. It functions as an analytical template that records both textual and translational variables, making the decision process explicit and replicable.
This section presents selected expressions from the wider corpus under three thematic groupings. Each extract illustrates how the interaction between communicative translation and postcolonial mediation guides the movement from source expression to English rendering.
The first thematic grouping concerns social relations and interpersonal positioning. In Fouda’s text, naming a person is rarely neutral; lexical choices index power, intimacy, usefulness, ridicule, or emotional dependence. Three expressions are particularly revealing.
Table 2: Extract No 1 Social Bonding and Instrumental Friendship
Table 3: Extract No 2 Age, Power and Economic Desire
Justification
Table 4: Extract No 3 Public and Secret Intimacy
The three extracts above show that the translation of relational hybridity depends on recovering social function rather than surface lexicon. In all three cases, modulation allows the English rendering to preserve pragmatic force. The resulting expressions sound less alien, but they do not empty out the source’s social critique. Instead, they recreate for the target audience the lived economy of friendship, dependency, and intimacy embedded in the original.
The second thematic grouping concerns economic life and survival strategies. Fouda’s text repeatedly demonstrates that urban speech is shaped by scarcity, hustle, and informal commerce. Here translation must deal not only with semantic meaning but with the material realities hidden inside routine expressions.
Table 5: Extract No 4 Speech as Social Currency
Table 6: Extract No 5 Selective Cultural Retention
Table 7: Extract No 6 Ritualized Conviviality
These examples confirm that economic and social survival in Fouda’s text is mediated through a lexicon of improvisation and shared cultural scripts. Translation succeeds when it respects the different weights carried by different items. Some expressions can be modulated into accessible English; others, such as Mamie taro pilé, require visible cultural retention. This is where the balance between domestication and foreignization becomes operational rather than abstract.
The third thematic grouping addresses urban youth culture and figurative discourse. In this domain, hybrid expressions often rely on metaphor, exaggeration, and performative speech acts. Their meaning is inseparable from tone.
Table 8: Extract No 7 Figurative Romance
Table 9: Extract No 8 Escalated Verbal Conflict
Target audience
Translatability constraints
Table 10: Extract No 9 Pragmatic Warning
EXCERPT No:79
Source text
This third grouping shows the limits of literalism most clearly. When figurative expressions are transferred word for word, the target reader may recover the image but miss the intended act: teasing, warning, irony, flirtation, or insult. Modulation therefore becomes less a stylistic preference than a necessity. At the same time, the loss of certain metaphors reminds us that communicative translation is not loss-free. It is an exercise in ranked priorities, and in this study the priority is culturally intelligible function.
Across the selected extracts, one pattern becomes unmistakable: the translation of Cameroonian hybridity is not governed by one universal solution but by a structured repertoire of decisions. Nevertheless, the dominance of modulation in the wider corpus is understandable. It is the strategy most capable of moving between the source culture’s compact images and the target audience’s interpretive habits. Borrowing remains available, but only where retaining a local form contributes more meaning than replacing it.
One important implication of these results is that the four sub-domains identified in the wider corpus are not merely convenient classificatory boxes; they reveal the breadth of hybrid meaning in Fouda’s text. Social relations, economic survival, youth performance, and figurative pragmatics are all equally productive sites of hybridity. The balanced distribution of twenty-five expressions per sub-domain suggests that Cameroonian hybrid language is woven through the whole social fabric rather than concentrated in a narrow slang register. This matters for translation because it means the translator cannot approach the text as if only a few flashy expressions require special treatment. The entire discourse environment is hybridized, and translation strategy must remain alert from beginning to end.
The dominance of modulation also becomes clearer when viewed against the kinds of semantic work these expressions perform. In many cases, the source form compresses a social scene or ideological stance into an image that is obvious to insiders but opaque to outsiders. The translator’s job is therefore not to decode a simple word meaning, but to recover an entire frame of interaction. Expressions such as ami de bière, deuxième bureau, and mouiller la gorge demand a shift from lexical form to social function. Modulation is the strategy that makes such shifts possible without turning the translation into a paraphrase every time. It preserves force by changing angle. That is why it appears with such consistency in the broader project.
Another significant result concerns cultural legitimacy. The participant responses indicate that English-speaking Cameroonians are not asking for a translation stripped of local speech. On the contrary, they seem willing to accept selective retention, local flavor, and strategic explanation when these elements help preserve Cameroonian voice. This finding challenges the assumption that audience accessibility always requires strong standardization. In the context of Cameroon, the target readership already inhabits a multilingual national space. What they need is not the removal of cultural difference but a controlled pathway into it. Translation thus becomes an instrument of mutual legibility between linguistic communities within the same nation.
By combining a translatability grid, participant evaluation, and descriptive statistics, the research offers a practical model for future work on African hybrid texts. The grid makes translational reasoning transparent; the participant data test the plausibility of the proposed solutions; and the statistical pattern adds a further layer of coherence to the qualitative argument. For translators, lecturers, and postgraduate researchers working on multilingual African literature, this mixed procedure offers a replicable way to move from intuition to accountable analysis. In that sense, the study contributes not only to the translation of Fouda’s text, but also to the pedagogy of translating linguistic hybridity in postcolonial settings.
The findings also carry implications for translator training in Cameroon. Programmes that focus mainly on standard-language equivalence risk leaving students underprepared for the realities of hybrid discourse, where social context, register, and cultural inference matter as much as lexical knowledge. The present study suggests that translators need explicit training in sociolinguistic interpretation, local discourse practices, and strategy justification. They should be able to explain why one item demands modulation, why another calls for selective borrowing, and why still another may need amplification or a mixed solution. In a multilingual country where public discourse routinely crosses codes, this competence is not peripheral; it is central to professional relevance.
There is also a broader readership implication. Translating Je parle camerounais pour un renouveau francofaune, by Mercedes Fouda into English for Anglophone Cameroonians is not simply a literary exercise directed at one book. It models how cultural material can circulate more equitably within a bilingual nation whose language communities often encounter each other unevenly. A carefully mediated translation allows Francophone hybrid expression to become legible to Anglophone readers without stripping it of its Francophone-Cameroonian texture. In that sense, the paper contributes to a more reciprocal cultural economy. It suggests that translation can help build internal national readerships, not only external global ones, and that postcolonial translation theory becomes most persuasive when it serves concrete acts of intra-national understanding.
Future research can build on this foundation in several directions. A larger comparative study could test whether the same strategic distribution holds across multiple Cameroonian authors writing in hybrid French, hybrid English, or mixed Pidgin-inflected prose. Another line of inquiry could compare reader response across regions, age groups, or educational backgrounds in order to see how different Cameroonian publics negotiate translated hybridity. Finally, digital annotation, glossary design, and multimodal translation could be explored as complementary tools for carrying culture-specific expressions into English without either flattening or overburdening the text. These extensions would not replace the present article’s core claim. Rather, they would deepen it: hybrid language requires translation methods that are linguistically alert, culturally situated, and empirically tested.
This article set out to examine how Cameroonian linguistic hybridity can be translated into English for an English-speaking Cameroonian readership without neutralizing its cultural force. Using material drawn from Mercedes Fouda’s Je parle Camerounais pour un renouveau francofaune, the study has shown that hybrid expressions in the text operate as dense social signs. They encode relationship types, economic precarity, cultural familiarity, irony, youth identity, and pragmatic force in compressed and often metaphorical forms.
The analysis has demonstrated that literal translation is rarely adequate for such material. The dominant and most effective solution is communicative translation supported primarily by modulation. This strategy allows the translator to recover what the expression is doing, not merely what its individual words denote. At the same time, the article has argued against an indiscriminate pursuit of fluency. Selective foreignization remains necessary where the local term itself is part of the meaning, as shown by the retention of Mami Achu.
The results from the larger corpus confirm this balanced position. Modulation dominates the micro-level decisions, domestication predominates at the macro level, and participant responses strongly support the rejection of mechanical translation for hybrid Cameroonian discourse. The article therefore concludes that the best way to translate Fouda’s Cameroonian linguistic hybridity is to treat translation as cultural mediation: domesticate for intelligibility where needed, retain local forms where they carry identity, and never confuse hybrid language with error. What Fouda writes is not broken French awaiting repair. It is Cameroonian meaning in motion, and the translator’s task is to help it move across languages without losing its pulse.
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Bidbila, DN; Atoh, JC; Ayonghe, LS (2026). Bridging the Hybrid Divide: Postcolonial Translation, Domestication, and the Englishing of Camfranglais. Greener Journal of Art and Humanities, 11(1): 53-68, https://doi.org/10.15580/gjah.2026.1.062426096.
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