ABSTRACT
Translation is central to the history and literature of Kanaky/New Caledonia. This article examines the contribution of three of its most significant translators against the background of the colonial and missionary histories and the postcolonial contexts that shaped their work. As François Bogliolo puts it, a place of transportation became a place of intersections, the stage of one world for another (Bogliolo: 2000). No other literature in the French speaking world, he claims, has used translation so extensively. Translation constructed new and exotic ethnographic discourses. It served as a mediator not only between languages considered in a hierarchical relation but also between two literary worlds. Kanak1 [Melanesian] oral
literature was translated into written medium and more than half of the oral literature available today in print form is in translation. Written French, it can be argued, served the conservation and dissemination of a culture in translation, a literature haunted by the ghosts of its indigenous informants.
