Translating Caribbean Literature: A Homegoing by Anita Barton-Williams

In this meticulously argued essay, Anita Barton-Williams dissects the reductive, extractive practices prevalent in the market for Caribbean literature, particularly what is lost or harmed when works are translated from Creole into Western colonial languages like French and English. She further explores how a translator may become a better 'bridge', espousing the possibilities for Creole-Creole translations as a way of strengthening Caribbean relationality and solidarity overall.

Supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.

I found home at the airport, in a woman who was probably the same age my grandmother was when she went back to Port Antonio. I cannot remember her face and that distresses me, but her voice is clear, her tone is sweet, and her rhythm I know, because it was the first time I heard myself in French. It was the first time I understood a phrase without the mechanical process: 

Input French
Translate to English
Output English
Translate to French
mouth
open
speak. 

There was something I could not articulate at the time about the rhythm she spoke in. It sounded like Saturday mornings, loud music playing, and finding something to clean; it sounded like a Dutch pot on a Sunday, like a towel laid on the back of a truck on the way down to Portland Beach. It sounded like home. 

What I did not know then, in that airport, was that this recognition was not about fluency or linguistic discernment. It was about pulse. It was about proximity that even my diasporic upbringing managed to embody. It was about hearing something in French, spoken by a Martinican, that carried the cadence of my mother’s lost tongue. At that moment, translation felt like a reunion. 

Translation as Legibility: The Dominant Model  

In life sciences translation – the primary focus of my work, including ethics committee letters for clinical trials and serious adverse event reports – I prioritise the accurate conveyance of clinical detail and patient experience over idiom or cultural nuance. The work centres legibility: clarity is what drives decision-making. Here, pharmaceutical clients demand precision above all else. 

Although life sciences and literary translation often appear fundamentally different, both practices respond to a common demand: that the text remain legible to its intended audience. In both contexts, powerful actors – pharmaceutical clients in life sciences and publishers in literary translation – position translation as a transfer of meaning: a process of equivalence that privileges perceived fluency. This process is not neutral; it reflects subjective choices and operates within a framework in which the colonial desire to know takes precedence. 

This understanding is not abstract. I presented my first academic paper at an in-person conference in Toulouse in 2022. A guest speaker, a long-established literary translator, explained that publishers regularly commission their work without requiring a pitch. They described accepting commissions without reading the source text in full beforehand, instead translating and reworking iteratively. While I cannot say whether this reflects the practice of most literary translators, the speaker’s openness struck me, as did what it revealed about publishing priorities: legibility and accessibility. 

This model relies on capitalist structures – the need to sell and produce within short turnaround times – and on a white, male imagined literary audience. Within these constraints, translators have little space or time to consider culture in the translation of Caribbean literature.  

Translation functions as a field of power, where we shop for the Caribbean novel, and where Black narratives – which, as John Keene notes, continue to be positioned as ‘fringe’ literature – remain marginalised. Whether seen in their rhythms, oral traditions, Creole usage, religious and spiritual undertones, or musical timing, these texts carry remnants of their colonial history alongside themes of resistance, Négritude, Créolité, and Blackness. What is lost in this model is not simply culture, but relation. 

Legibility – the dominant factor driving this model that underscores the production of literary translation – demands that no remnants of the source text remain. It grants the reader access to understanding under specific terms, privileging their gaze as white and Western. Any unfamiliarity becomes a flaw, something to overcome rather than a feature to work with. Linguistic opacity and cultural specificity become hindrances to marketability. 

As a result, the translator’s role becomes restricted: they remove friction, ensuring that the reader can absorb the cultural material unhindered, ‘enjoy’ it, discuss it, and then move on to the next big title. In this way, legibility, readability, and accessibility become synonymous with fluency and quality. Consequently, publishers and translators reinforce a cycle in which reader responses define quality, extracting from the margins and reproducing biased markers of value.  

First, a Caribbean translation’s foreign publishing rights must be sold to a publisher, and then the book itself must be sold to the market. The story must prove its commercial value in the target context, and the translation must then perform in that market. This performance remains subject to preconceived – often colonial, stereotypical – ideas of what a Caribbean novel should discuss and sound like in French and English. Thus, it sets the stage for the recolonisation of Caribbean literature, reshaping it not only to make it more manageable, but also more palatable — granting a kind of voyeuristic, anthropological access. Creole becomes merely stylised, political undercurrents flattened or ignored. Legibility, readability, and accessibility become the tenets of risk management — the imagined reader must not be alienated, and the novel must sell.  

... translation choices do not exist in a vacuum; they are never neutral

As Keene noted ten years ago, this model demonstrates the urgent need to disrupt the white hegemony of literary translation. It also feeds into what Corine Tachtiris more recently describes as the unchallenged privilege of white translators: the assumption that they are the natural or default fit for any given text, allowing them to see themselves as the right person for the job. Within this regime, translation reshapes Caribbean literature, rerouting its rhythm, essence, and cultural specificity through dominant linguistic norms, thereby reinforcing the assumption that the reader has a right to full, unrestricted access. 

At the very least, this demand for legibility is an insidious one, revealing itself, over time, as an institutionalised practice. At its most, it carries heinous echoes of the colonial desire to know, classify, and conquer. What if not everyone has a right to, or is permitted, access? What if access focused on those who have been displaced, extracted, lost? What if the purpose of translation is reunification?  

What Gets Lost — Comparative Reading  

An examination of the French translations of How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (2021) by Cherie Jones and Augustown (2016) by Kei Miller shows identifiable patterns that are not incidental but structural. These are not isolated lexical, terminological, or simple syntactical decisions. They are, instead, symptomatic of an industry that privileges fluency, alleviates racial discomfort, and recolonises the Caribbean novel. An analysis of rhythm, racial description, and the treatment of Creole in the original texts across both translations proves how acutely legibility, readability, and accessibility have been regulated. 

Rhythm in Caribbean writing is a continuation of orality. It functions as intertextuality. In both translations, there is a rupture in the rhythms, something that is not often explored or prioritised in translation practice. The effect is a break in lineage.  

Source: ‘Don’t look at me, pops! Don’t. Look. At. Rass. Hole. Me!’  
Target: ‘Me regarde pas, le vieux! Me. Regarde. Pas. Putain!’ 
Back translation: ‘Don’t look at me, old man! Don’t. Look. At. Me. Goddamn it!’ 

In How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, the text is not just read; it is seen and heard. Jones uses rhythm directly inspired by calypso, the foundations of Carnival. Children of the Caribbean understand the pauses, the breaks, the sharpness, the disrespect in the way the person in the quote is being addressed.  

The Creole expletive, although used in varying contexts, serves here to make clear that the speaker is serious, and to anchor the text in Barbados. The target translation attempts to mimic the Creole structure, dropping the formal grammatical French structure with the omission of the negative ‘ne’. This also provides commentary, whether knowingly or not, on the perception of Creole – in this case, Anglophone creoles – which are treated as less-than, as dialects and not languages of their own. Whilst there is a replication of punctuation (the use of full stops), the Creole expression – the Caribbean expression – is gone and replaced by ‘putain’, a generic expletive belonging to a Western Francophone setting. 

Controlled in this way, the translation teeters within the binary of domestication and foreignisation, a distinction that has been critiqued for defining translation in relation to a presumed normative centre (Bhanot and Tiang 2020), where the former is framed as the greater evil and the latter as the lesser. Both strategies, however, bind postcolonial literature and its translations into an either/or, obscuring the harm each produces. The former is exemplified in the extract: it gives the reader access and places them and their understanding at the centre of the text. The latter method may have opted to keep ‘rasshole’ as is, capturing it and displaying it on the page as a stumbling block, as a form of othering. The impression of rage and ‘vexness’ is carried over, but whose it is becomes less clear.  

The same regulatory constraints can be observed in the translation of Augustown.  

Source: ‘Is like Babylon want to keep we down.’
Target: ‘On dirait bien que Babylone veut nous garder sous son talon.’ 
Back translation: ‘It seems like Babylon is trying to keep us under its heel.’ 

The cadence, the pulse of the source, is destroyed. The orality is stripped and apprehended by literary form. Once again, meaning and rhythm shift in the French. This can be seen in the extension of the inflection ‘is like’ to ‘on dirait bien que’, and the erasure of the identity of the speaker — a Rastafarian who is using Iyaric, which is intimate and collective.  

Its use infers institutional and systemic oppression. The beauty in the way the Rasta speaks invokes community with the use of the first person plural. When replicated with the ‘nous’ in the target, the inclusivity is lost and the violence of the ‘keep we down’ is minimised through the target's adapted idiom. The grammar of resistance shifts, and the message becomes commentary, the rhythm falling silent.  

... the rubble of colonialism still wants to ensure that we don’t know each other

This regulation extends beyond cadence into racial lexicon, as another extract from How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House shows. Within the universalist framework of French – which resists the articulation of race beyond the category of the human – it is no wonder that racial lexicon becomes another site of regulation. 

Source: 'It had been a blue-black man with a grey-blue gun and a palm wide open, standing at the side of her bed demanding money.'  
Target: 'C’était un homme à la peau noire de noire au pistolet gris-bleu et à la main grande ouverte, debout à son chevet et réclamant de l’argent.' 
Back translation: 'It was a man with black black skin with a grey blue gun and a large open hand, standing at her headboard demanding money.' 

Blue-black is not a neutral term in the source; it carries derogatory connotations, and although actions have been made to celebrate and destigmatise dark skin, the term is still a key marker of pigmentocracy and colourism in the Caribbean. The shift from ‘blue-black’ to ‘à la peau noire de noir’ appears subtle – tactful, even – yet it erases the sociohistorical charge in the source. Blue-black becomes negligible; its violence is tamed. French universalism struggles to contend with racial gradation, and the translation exemplifies this with its regulation; the French reader is safe and not made to be uncomfortable nor to confront colonial inheritance. 

Where racial terminology related to Blackness is flattened into generalities, racial descriptors related to whiteness are embellished to reinforce hierarchy as can be seen in another extract from How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House.  

Source: ‘If you are doing this and you pass Tall Pink Man walking his big gruff white dog with pointed ears …’ 
Target: ‘Si tu fais ça et que tu croises le Grand Monsieur Rose qui promène sa grosse chienne blanche aux oreilles pointues …’ 
Back translation: ‘If you are doing this and you pass the Tall Pink Sir walking his big white dog with pointed ears …’ 

Man does not become homme but Monsieur — the notion of respectability dictating that a literal rendering be eschewed, rather than allowing the intertextuality of the source text to come through. The ‘Tall Pink Man’ is just another man, much like the Black male character; in the source, however, his difference lies in his pinkness. The sun is not for him; he is continuously sunburned. He is out of place, not because he holds a dog leash in hand but because his family tree stretches back to the whip — a lineage not of belonging, but of violence. 

‘Monsieur’ allows the figure to sit within French propriety: a man who is a stranger is a monsieur and not just a man. In the source text, however, the Black male character’s naming of him as ‘Tall’ and ‘Pink’ is deliberate; it marks and fixes whiteness, granting the Black speaker a form of power not typically afforded to him. Blackness observing whiteness: this reversal of the typical dynamic is lost in the French, and hierarchy is restored. So even if Blackness observes whiteness, the use of monsieur restores the power dynamics.  

Legibility, readability, and accessibility become the tenets of risk management — the imagined reader must not be alienated, and the novel must sell

When racial descriptions position whiteness as a victim of capitalism, their rendering in How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is white-gloved.  

Source: ‘She knows that she is a descendant of the scorned redlegs of St John, the poor whites whom both black descendants of slaves and white descendants of slave masters look down upon, and as such, that she is the equal of neither.’  
Target: ‘Elle sait qu’elle descend des redlegs méprisés de St John, ces pauvres Blancs que les descendants d’esclaves et même d’esclavagistes regardent de haut, et qu’à ce titre, elle n’est l’égale ni des uns, ni des autres.’
Back translation: ‘She knows that she is a descendant of the scorned redlegs of St John, the poor whites whom both black descendants of slaves and white descendants of slave masters look down upon, and as such, that she is the equal of neither.’  

There is not a single omission from the source. When rendering whiteness in moments of vulnerability, the translator handles the text with notable care. This suggests a conscious or subconscious lack of neutrality. A pattern emerges: the translation is most faithful when describing white characters. It reinforces their position and the power dynamics they inhabit, even when the source does not. When whiteness is positioned as victimhood, the translation remains closely aligned with the source. Vulnerability is preserved; it is softened. By contrast, elements of Blackness – such as Creole language or racial descriptors – are reduced, erased, and put in their place. 

Fluency Suggests Equivalence  

In trying to break from universalism and l’Académie française, translators can also be seen to borrow from other Creole-speaking nations, as in the French translation of Augustown. 

Source: ‘Shame on me. Every lickle yute from Augustown ought to know the story of the flying preacherman.’  
Target: ‘Honte à moi! Chaque tite-marmaye à Augustown devrait la connaître, l’histoire du Prêcheur volant.’ 
Back translation: ‘Shame on me. Every small “pickney” from Augustown should know the story of the flying preacher.’ 

Yute becomes ‘marmaye’, even though earlier in the text it was used to translate ‘pickney’, collapsing the distinction between the two. Marmay (adapted by the translator to 'marmaye') is used in Réunion Creole, so not only is this an adaptation of a Creole form, it also takes the text far away from its original region. Although this may appear to be an interesting strategy, the shifting use of different Creoles throughout the translation – including the adaptation of Réunion Creole alongside Haitian and Antillean Creoles – lacks consistency. While on the surface this appears to be an attempt at inter-Caribbean connectedness, the inconsistency instead suggests experimentation without care. The use of Réunion Creole strikes as something heard while on holiday in des départements et régions d’outre-mer (the so-called overseas departments and regions of France) — like a decorative item hanging on the wall of a hotel to give the visitors a taste of an ‘exotic’ place. 

Though one could argue that using another island's Creole is a form of displacement, can it, perhaps, be beneficial instead – when the work is undertaken by a Black Caribbean translator – in bringing the Afro Caribbean/Caribbean diaspora and the region closer together? I would go on to say that the rendering of original work into fragmentary français soutenu (formal French) is a much more violent act. 

The Translator in Between  

In 2021, when the foreign rights for Amanda Gorman’s debut collection The Hill We Climb brought translators' positionalities under the spotlight – introducing discussions of race, authority, and representation into the centre of translation discourse – a much-needed shift occurred. For some translators, it was a moment of reflection: Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, a white, non-binary, Dutch author, stepped away from doing the Dutch translation (Michallon 2021). For others, it exposed white fragility — Catalan translator Víctor Obiols stated, ‘hoy Univers me tenía que pasar el contrato. Tendré que buscar betún ...’ (‘Today Univers was supposed to send me the contract. I'll have to look for shoe polish ...’) (García 2021).  

A translator's self-interrogation regarding the privilege and power they wield – whether they’re aware of it or not – is not to incite shame. It is, instead, a kind and considerate invitation to unlearn conscious and subconscious racial and gendered hierarchies that inform their translation choices.  

The comparative examples examined previously expose that translation decisions affect rhythm, racial hierarchy, and cultural meaning. It is evident that translation choices do not exist in a vacuum; they are never neutral. As translation scholar Loredana Polezzi notes in her conversation with Mona Baker and historian Vicente L Rafael (from Wasafiri 111: Translating Lives), the myth of the neutral translator or interpreter is unsustainable. Translator and translation scholar Françoise Massardier-Kenney also asserts that translation is a form of cultural production that plays a significant role in shaping culture. Translators bring their own lived experiences, analysis, understanding, and interpretation to the texts they translate. If left unexamined, these inform their translation choices in ways that can be harmful. 

We are left asking, what cultural or racial labour is the translator doing? What should they be doing or avoiding? What preconceptions and biases must be examined and unlearned? Is the translation based in solidarity or control?  

Translation should be an exercise in the rejection of colonial demand for transparency. It must resist the anthropological gaze. It cannot be an exercise in extractive practices or sharing without surrender. It must embody connection without assimilation. 

Toward a Homegoing Practice  

I presented on this topic at a conference in 2022. My paper, entitled Translating Blackness in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), advocated for Creole to Creole translations. A question from one of the organisers suggested that doing so would create something unintelligible. It served as a reminder of how much the rubble of colonialism still wants to ensure that we don’t know each other. Creole-Creole translations can function differently when initiated in solidarity and cultural grounding. They can create Caribbean relationality rather than distortion. One of my favourite examples of this comes from content creator Specta Say So, whose posts feature translations of dancehall lyrics from Jamaican Creole into Martinican Creole, bypassing enforced languages, and instead using languages created for survival and self-affirmation. 

While guest lecturing for translation students at Université des Antilles in 2022, we looked at the translation of Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings and advanced a Translating Blackness framework that Kesewa John, a historian of Black British and Caribbean intellectual and political histories, had begun workshopping. We discussed the translation choices and ruminated on which readership had been prioritised. The students were disappointed. They could not see or hear themselves. 

They felt closer to Jamaica than to France. They could find pieces of themselves in the Jamaican Creole, but not in the French, even though they are French by citizenship. The Creole had been bulldozed into something the Académie would be proud of. Had a Caribbean readership been prioritised, had their cultural historical proximity taken precedence, then the text could have meant something else to them. It was a missed opportunity to converse with lost siblings.  

Return — Homegoing  

Kaiama L Glover, drawing on Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity, argues that opacity must root Blackness as structural, not ornamental. Opacity is not enough without cultural grounding. We must be able to trust the reader not to extract but to protect. Opacity, in this sense, serves as preservation, not invitation, so translation becomes a reflective, communal practice, requiring consultation, cultural knowledge, and slow and deliberate work. This would require global publishing to break free from capitalist constraints. 

In an unpublished interview with Cherie Jones conducted as part of my PhD research, we talked about the French translation of her debut novel, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House. She described a book signing in Guadeloupe where the novel was warmly received, yet she felt estranged from the experience, as she could neither read nor understand the French translation. The people there – who could have been kin: brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins – felt familiar, yet their mouths carried her story in a different key, one that no longer felt like hers but belonged to the translator. There was joy in granting access to kindred, but there was also sadness in having to accept that she would never fully know how the person in between relayed her meaning.  

When she said this, I thought of Homegoing (2016) by Yaa Gyasi and of those of us for whom home is a hyphen. Diaspora babies like me live between worlds, ones we belong to and ones we inhabit, moving as pendulums. Our swinging permits a sharing of rhythms, histories, proximity, and recognition even when language differs. I wondered how I might be a bridge. How can I translate without performance and voyeurism, the same way I am at home? Shoes off, hands washed, house clothes on, drinking something warm.  

Works Cited 

Bhanot, Kavita, and Jeremy Tiang. Introduction. Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation by Bhanot and Tiang, Tilted Axis Press, 2020, pp. 7-13. 

García, Concha. ‘El traductor al catalán de Amanda Gorman es también rechazado por no ser ni mujer ni negra.’ La Razón, 6 Oct 2021 (accessed 16 April 2026). 

Glover, Kaiama L. ‘“Blackness” in French: On Translation, Haiti, and the Matter of Race.’ L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 59, no. 2, 2019, pp. 25–41. 

Gyasi, Yaa. Homegoing. Viking, 2016. 

James, Marlon. A Brief History of Seven Killings. Oneworld Publications, 2014. 

Jones, Cherie. Personal interview. 2025. 

Keene, John. ‘Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness.’ Poetry Foundation, 28 April 2016 (accessed 16 April 2026). 

Michallon, Clémence. ‘Dutch writer steps down from assignment to translate Amanda Gorman’s work: “I understand people who feel hurt”.’ The Independent, 26 Feb 2021 (accessed 16 April 2026). 

Massardier-Kenney, Françoise. ‘Towards a Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice.’ The Translator, vol. 3, no. 1, 1997, pp. 55–69, doi:10.1080/13556509.1997.10798988. 

Polezzi, Loredana. ‘The Politics and Ethics of Translation: A Conversation with Mona Baker and Vicente L Rafael.’ Wasafiri, vol. 37, no. 3,2022, pp. 3–7, doi:10.1080/02690055.2022.2067107. 

Specta F.B aka le Préfet aka La Culture [SpectaSaySo] Instagram (accessed 16 April 2026). 

Tachtiris, Corine. ‘Privilege, Race, and Translation.’ Words Without Borders, June 2021 (accessed 16 April 2026). 

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Cover image: The Wild Tamarind of Jamaica with Scarlet Pod and Barbet by Marianne North (1872)