Translation as Literacy

By Laura Wagner

The Haitian Creole expression analfabèt pa bèt, widely associated with former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, translates to “being illiterate doesn’t make you stupid.” I remember a friend, a middle-class Haitian educator around my mom’s age, finding analfabèt pa bèt to be scandalous and shameful. “Imagine a president telling people they don’t need to learn to read and write!”

My friend is a progressive with a good heart, but I think her interpretation is a bit narrow. But I’ve long bristled when people refer to Haiti’s high rate of illiteracy. I think of market vendors converting between Haitian gourdes (a real currency) and “Haitian dollars” (an imaginary currency) like it was second nature. I recall farmers who, at a glance, can tell the difference between sweet manioc (which can be steamed and eaten as is) and bitter manioc (which must go through labor-intensive processing to eliminate toxic levels of cyanide). I think of Vodou drummers and dancers who memorize complex rhythms and express them through their bodies, artists who create exquisite work using materials that others have discarded, fishers who learn to identify subtle changes in the sea and the sky. I remember people telling a whole universe of meaning through folktales or aphorisms or jokes with double meanings. I think of everyone who manages to navigate the everyday dangers, complexities, and possibilities of a city like Port-au-Prince—to read the signs, to smell the air. I think of people, in the city or the countryside, surviving both (un)natural disasters and the humanitarian regimes that are supposed to address them. I think of everyone who undertakes the perilous trek from South America to the US-Mexico border, speaking at least enough Spanish and perhaps Portuguese to negotiate passage through unfamiliar countries, learning to ward off thieves and venomous snakes in the jungle of the Darién Gap, and finally coming face-to-face with US immigration authorities. I think of how they have learned (or been forced) to adapt to everything life throws at them—to read landscapes, plants, waves, storms, and people. Is that what it means to be “illiterate”?

When I talk about Haiti, I say instead that such-and-such percentage of the population is not traditionally literate, meaning able to read and write to a certain predefined degree.

I became a translator somewhat by accident. By training, I am an anthropologist, which involved transcribing and translating interviews that I conducted in Haiti over several years. By another accident, I became the project archivist for the Radio Haiti collection at Duke University, which involved listening to the audio archive of Haiti’s most prominent independent radio station and providing detailed multilingual metadata for over 5,000 recordings. I also transcribed and translated selections from the archive: the station’s director, Jean Dominique, on why “on Radio Haiti, the drum never stops beating”; Dominique on the meaning of the Saut d’Eau Vodou pilgrimage; a young Michel-Rolph Trouillot speaking to station manager Richard Brisson about Trouillot’s Haitian Creole history of the Revolution, Ti Dife Boule sou Istwa Dayiti; and Dominique’s tribute to Brisson ten years later, after he was executed by Duvalier’s regime. In other words, I honed my skills as a translator through the work I was already doing, in an effort to make Haitian voices and perspectives more accessible to the English-speaking world. Nowadays, I am one of the leads on the Haitian Creole team at Respond Crisis Translation, a nonprofit that provides translation and interpretation to individuals in crisis and the organizations that serve them. On the Creole team, we primarily serve migrants and asylum-seekers.

Radio Haiti staff and some of the actors who appeared in the radiophonic production of Gouverneurs

Translation doesn’t require only that you read and write two (or more) languages. It requires that you recognize what you don’t know and develop the skills to figure it out, and it requires multiple kinds of literacy.

Translation as Cultural and Contextual Literacy

Accurate translation involves not only translating the words but also the meaning behind them. I often think of this interview on Radio Haiti with the mothers and sister of three young men who were killed by the Haitian army during a peaceful demonstration in 1986. Vernilia Vernet, the mother of eighteen-year-old Wilson Auguste, describes her son: “That child did laundry for me. Sometimes I’d come home to find my clothes, even my underwear, washed—he’s the one who washed them for me.” She says that since Wilson’s death: “I have rashes all over, all over my body. I’m not well at all.” Without context—including the tone of her voice, which sounds like she’s on the brink of tears the whole time—her words might seem irrelevant, even strange or callous. But Radio Haiti’s listeners would understand that she meant the difficult work of washing clothes by hand, and that would be uncommon for a son to do laundry for his mother—or really, for a male to wash clothes at all. That detail shows both how close they were and how thoughtful Wilson was. And when Vernilia speaks of the rash, it isn’t just a rash. She is describing a physical embodiment of grief. We might also consider translation to require emotional literacy as well as an understanding of the cultural and social context.

I joke that to translate Jean Dominique, you not only need to read and write the original language and the target language. You also need to be a poet, a historian, a farmer or an agronomist, and a cinephile with a deep knowledge of Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, and Federico Fellini. You need to possess a deep cultural knowledge of both Vodou lwa (what differentiates Ogoun Feray from Ogoun Badagri?) and Jacques Brel (enough to finish the line when he says, “The bourgeois who are like . . . you know”). When Dominique translated his own editorials from French to Creole (or vice versa), it was never a literal translation. As a man who was literate and literary in both languages, he could pivot between kreyòl rèk (pure Haitian Creole, rather than the Frenchified Creole that many educated, bilingual Port-au-Princeans like himself spoke) and French that, I’m told, bordered on Baudelairean.

Image of "Saut d'Eau" Jean Dominique’s report on the pilgrimage, in his wild Olympia script typewriter font. 

In the early 1970s, Dominique and his sister Madeleine Paillère translated the dialogue of Jacques Roumain’s famous peasant novel Gouverneurs de la Rosée into Haitian Creole, from which Radio Haiti’s staff created a radio play. As Dominique explained, even though Roumain’s original novel “was written in excellent French,” it was nonetheless “a very special Haitian-like French. Sometimes you have the smell of Haiti in this French.” Annaïse, the protagonist Manuel’s love interest, says baille-moi ta main, which means give me your hand—but the verb bailler is obsolete in contemporary French; people instead say donner. “But Roumain went back in time, and discovered that the ‘ban m lamen,’ the Haitian ‘ban m lamen,’ was an old French word, ‘bailler.’ So when Annaïse said, ‘Baille-moi ta main,’ it was French, but it was also pure Haitian Creole.”

One of Dominique’s favorite terms was “pawòl andaki,” which means coded, veiled speech: talking about things indirectly was a way to maintain plausible deniability under dictatorships and military regimes. (Famously, Radio Haiti’s journalists would talk about resistance to other dictators, like Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza or the Shah of Iran, to gesture to the Haitian people’s resistance to Jean-Claude Duvalier. Translating and broadcasting Gouverneurs de la Rosée was a form of andaki resistance, too, for, as Jean Dominique’s professional partner and wife Michèle Montas told me, “It was a novel, and novels are not supposed to be dangerous.”) Even when people were not speaking andaki, they were generally addressing others who had a shared frame of reference. For me, a non-Haitian who came to the Radio Haiti archive over a decade after the station closed, understanding the recordings in the archive and making them searchable and understandable to people who didn’t live through or remember those events required more than linguistic translation.

Jean Dominique returning from Radio Haiti’s exile in 1986 after Duvalier's fall

This same cultural and contextual literacy is crucial in my work at Respond Crisis Translation, translating documents for Haitian migrants and asylum seekers. To apply for asylum in the United States, someone must demonstrate that they have a “credible fear” of persecution if they are returned to their home country. Of course, the definition of what constitutes a “credible fear” is intentionally narrow, and many asylum seekers fail their credible fear interview not because they aren’t afraid but because the United States doesn’t recognize their fear as legitimate or because they didn’t know how to tell their story in a way that US authorities understand. For example, if a Haitian asylum-seeker says that another person has jalouzi (jealousy) toward them or rayi (hates) them, it means much more than that. It means that the second person is jealous or hateful to the point of wishing harm and willing to take steps to cause harm. And if the jealous or hateful person is in a position of power—a police officer, a gang leader with political ties, a local government authority—why wouldn’t that fall into the definition of “a credible fear or political persecution”?

We encounter a lot of terms that have specific meanings in the legal/immigration sector that are different from their common usage, such as relief (meaning protection, assistance, or redress—in the immigration context, this might mean asylum or a temporary stay of deportation) and removal (meaning “deportation”). (Is “removal” a euphemism, or the opposite of a euphemism? Perhaps they don’t want to say “deported,” but at least deportation is something that happens to people. A wart, a polyp, an inflamed appendix is “removed.”)

Sometimes translation also means speaking up and being an advocate. The more of this work I do, the more comfortable I am telling well-meaning organizations that their documents won’t be easy to translate into Haitian Creole (which generally also means that the original won’t be easy for most native English speakers to understand). A lot of these documents use the passive voice: you may be deported, you may be separated from your family. But in Creole, generally, there must be a subject; there must always be a “they.” They may deport you. They may separate you from your family. Who is “they”? ICE, CBP, immigration authorities, the US government. Passive voice evades and conceals (“mistakes were made”), but in Creole, it’s much harder to hide who is committing the violence.

Translation as Digital Literacy

What’s the point of translating the words if the platform remains impossible to navigate? This is what came to mind when journalist Andrew Deck asked me for my thoughts on the CBP One app’s Haitian Creole translation. The translation itself wasn’t great (for starters, the Fact Sheet landing page ranmostofthewordstogetherwithoutspaces, the “Terms and Conditions” page, translated “Customs and Border Patrol” as the wrong kind of “customs,” and while “Country of Residence” and “Principal Language” were translated, their accompanying drop-down menus were not). But making something like CBP One actually accessible and useful to Haitian asylum seekers—or asylum-seekers, period—requires far more than linguistic translation. The design is hostile and buggy (among other things, its “live photo” often refuses to recognize people with dark skin). And even if every part of the CBP One app had worked correctly, many of its intended users would have been unfamiliar with how to use it. The mandatory two-factor authentication process wasn’t available in Haitian Creole, but if it had been translated, how easy would it be to follow the instructions if you had never before used, or heard of, two-factor authentication? What if you don’t have a smartphone, or a place to charge a smartphone? What if you don’t have a data plan or Wi-Fi? It’s hard to look at CBP One and not think that the government is negligent at best, and intentionally unjust toward asylum-seekers at worst—or, as Amnesty International argues, a violation of international human rights law. This app, which is nominally supposed to streamline the process of requesting asylum, is actually a deterrent. This is why, just last month, asylum-seekers and advocates sued the US government over the use of CBP One.

CBP One Fact Sheet landing page

Translation and Critical Literacy

My work—whether as an anthropologist conducting and translating interviews, as an archivist translating and contextualizing recordings from Radio Haiti’s archive, or as an activist translator serving migrants and asylum-seekers at Respond Crisis Translation—aims to make information, stories, voices, and experiences more accessible across linguistic divides. This is especially important because there is so little critical literacy about Haiti and the situation there. Many media accounts draw on tired tropes about Haiti and Haitian people. No one in my echo chamber will forget David Brooks blaming the 2010 earthquake on “progress-resistant cultural influences,” or a CNN reporter believing that a mother had callously thrown her children’s bodies away (for more on why a bad translation might be the cause of that misunderstanding, see this article by Gina Athena Ulysse). Some of the clichés are so predictable that they’ve become a bit of a joke (“take a shot every time you hear ‘poorest country in the Western hemisphere!’”).

Non-Haitian consumers need more critical literacy when they read or watch news about Haiti to determine what is fact, what is racist assumption, and what is myth. Even if it’s true, calling Haiti the “poorest country in the Western hemisphere” doesn’t tell you how it got that way, the historical and structural forces that led to the perpetual so-called crisis, or the role of powerful nations and international institutions in producing that poverty. In the end, it doesn’t matter if Haitians are telling their stories for the wider world, whether directly or in translation, if that wider world doesn’t have the capacity—or rather, the willingness—to think critically about the statistics and stereotypes they read.