A Thesis Submitted in Partial fulfilment of the Requirements for the Award of the Degree "Licence en Langue et Littérature Anglaises".

Résumé,

In a given community, language is a st of conventions; the speaker uses when he / she wants to be understood by the hearer. When this set of conventions is not shared, the language becomes a barrier to communication. In this respect, the ideal situation should be to have a common language. Such a solution is not possible, and it is in this respect that translation was given in these recent times of world's evolution and development as the solution.

Then, it is in this regard that the present study deals with limts of translatability due to language-specific and culture-specific terms, espacially trough the translation of Kirundi folktales into English. In fact, Kirundi folktales are language-specific and culture-specific narratives. They have two levels of sense : the external level (literal meaning) and internal level (figurative meaning).

In order to undestand figurative sense, one has to possess not only linguistic knowledge but also socio-cultural knowledge. The translator first and foremost reads and anlyses the folktale in the source language (Kirundi).

This helps to understand the social and cultural background of the folktale in order to know the message that it conveys. The translator then translates the folktale taking into account the cultural differences that are found in the two languages. Toconclude, from the analysis of data, it was found that, first of all, it is quite impossible to translate a Kirundi languaga and culture-specific expressions into English with hundred percent equivalent.

Second, the lack of exact equivalent words is due to the absence in target language culture of relevant situation feature for the source language. Third fo a good translation to occur, linguistic competence has to work together with the socio-cultural competence.