With Hommage à la femme noire (1988-1989), a six-volume encyclopedia illustrated with numerous iconographic documents, Simone and André Schwarz-Bart wanted to highlight the life stories of black women forgotten by history in order to create a gallery of ancestors, from the prehistoric ages to the twentieth century. If this project is ambitious, so is the translation of this hybrid work. This article will be devoted to the challenges involved in its translation from French to English in a North American context. The translators Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov have indeed taken initiatives so as to guide English-speaking readers by providing some elements of contextualization. We will thus examine the processes put in place to translate the encyclopedia as well as what these translation choices imply.