Uncle Remus' dialect: Translating from inland rural slave-heritage

A.  Translation issues: 

1.  Difficulty, risk.

Any translation is difficult and risky, because it is impossible to catch every nuance of one language form in another. Shades of meaning are lost. Translating is always difficult and even controversial, because, in most cultures, the body language is integral to the meaning of a communication, especially in the telling. Gestures accompanying words can even stand alone as communications.  Look at tv feeds from the United Nations, for example, with some delegates leaning back, silently stroking their chins, over and over, during an entire speech. Showing derision? We sense a communication without the words.

2. Controversy.

Translation is also controversial because it offers somebody the chance to substitute a personal view and agenda for the original, by word selection, additions, uses of words, inclusions and exclusions, and even through inadvertent errors. See the discussion of this particular 1995 translation of the Book of Luke into Gullah - this focuses on all those issues. See
://www.adoremus.org/997-Gullah.html: "De Good Nyews Bout Jedus Christ Wa Luke Write."

3.  Necessity, in order for content to be transmitted.

Translations are needed where the original language is so unfamiliar that a reader bogs down and goes to a movie about the story instead, with all the distortions of film by the promoters for its profit-entertainment purposes.

4.  Alternative to third party translations.

Proposal - be proactive. Do your own translation, or read one already available; then go immediately back to the original and read it in dialect with the plot meaning already in your head.

B.  The Nature of the Dialect in Uncle Remus

1.  Gullah.  The Uncle Remus dialect: So far, the dialect of Uncle Remus seems not to be "Gullah." Gullah appears to be a specific kind of blended language characteristic now of the coastal islands and coast areas of the south, a mix of many cultural traditions of slaves from different parts of Africa, see //www.coastalguide.com/gullah/.

Uncle Remus is not a coastal island set of tales, however - few water images - and there are many slave-heritage dialect roots in the plantation area context.  This site refers to the Virginia, the Sea Islands, the Louisiana, and the Inland -- that seems to be the area of the  Uncle Remus dialect. See www.bartleby.com/226/2011.html

The dialect of Uncle Remus in some sources is still often described as "Gullah," see for example //homepage.ntlworld.com/matt_kane/uncle%20remus%20tales.htm, but this may be a shorthand for all the kinds of dialects there really are.

2.  Enriching the dialect.

Many people came ashore in the Virginias and Carolinas, see Gypsies, Roma: Melungeons, Racial, Ethnic Mixes.  Among these are Portuguese sailors, and see in Uncle Remus the Portuguese word, "palaver", at Mr. Wolf Makes a Failure. See the footnote, the asterisk at the end there. 


See some of the issues in this Gullah translation of the Book of Luke, at http://www.adoremus.org/997-Gullah.html