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Through a comparison between the two translations of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Françoise Brodsky’s Une femme noire (Le Castor astral, 1993) and Sika Fakambi’s Mais leurs yeux dardaient sur Dieu (Zulma, 2018), this article aims at assessing how each translator renders the black vernacular of the novel, as well as the opposition between Standard English and the “dialect” which turns the narration into a double-voiced text. An anthropologist and a folklorist, Hurston transposes in her novel the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) which she analyses as a linguist in “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934). If, according to Brodsky, the translator must “invent” a language, Fakambi mixes several varieties of languages, keeping at times the original language, to render the text’s aurality/orality, so as to “estrange the French language.”