This corpus-based research investigated the problem of translating cultural referents from an African feminist context into English. It was based on the premise that due to the inherent differences in the two cultures, the translation exists in a space of deviation. Hence, cultural referents in Calixthe Beyala’s (2000) Comment cuisiner son mari à l’africaine were identified and classified under Santamaria’s (2010:522) five ideological categories, namely history, social structure, cultural institutions, social universe and material culture. Thereafter, the strategies for translating them were identified and the space of existence of the translations was investigated. Toury’s (1985) Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and Lazar’s (2005) Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis were applied for data collection and analyses to identify, describe, and explain 20 excerpts which embed cultural referents (five from each ideological category). For literary analyses, post-structuralist, formalist, biographical and sociological criticism were applied. Deconstruction, manipulation and communicative/functional translation theories were amenable to the research, while post-modern and cultural theories were applied for feminist analyses. The findings revealed that the translator mostly used hijacking and oblique translation to render cultural referents from French into English. The translations produced by these strategies were judged, according to Von Flotow’s (1998) criteria, to determine if they were shoddy, inaccessible/elitistor theoretically incongruent/hypocritical translations. The conclusion arrived at was that the rendering of cultural referents in the target text was, indeed, a complete deviation due to loss or gain, untranslatability, the problem of equivalence, issues with decoding and recoding as well as lapses attributable to the fundamental linguistic and cultural differences between the source and target languages. This confirmed the assumption that the translation of cultural referents in the novel exists as a heterotopia of deviation. It was, therefore, recommended that to adequately render cultural referents in feminist discourse, precedence should be given to the text-in-situation, that is, extralinguistic elements that condition text interpretation and reformulation, that are conditioned by cultural and linguistic differences between the author and translator. 

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