ABSTRACT
With the growing acceptance by scholars that crime fiction narratives can serve as a vehicle for authors to construct a sense of ‘self-identification’, the possibility emerges for ‘home-grown’ crime fiction texts to be harnessed by authors to evoke particular national traditions and identities. Together with the recognition by translation theorists that literary translation has the ability to perform a culture for a new target readership, this has led to intense debate surrounding the difficulties posed by the translation of cultural specificities and the possible effects that chosen translation strategies may have on perceptions of the source culture for the new target readership. This article forms part of a larger project that examines what happens to the culturally specific features of Australian crime fiction novels produced and published in the last 30 years when they are translated into French for consumption by the francophone world. It will take as a case study a crime fiction novel by Australian Aboriginal author Philip McLaren, Scream Black Murder/Tueur d’Aborigènes, in which the author has consciously set out to construct a distinctive sense of Australian cultural identity and difference.
