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Journal articles on the topic 'African literature – Translations into English'
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1
Kendall, Judy. "Saro-Wiwa's Language of Dissent: Translating between African Englishes." Translation and Literature 27, no. 1 (March 2018): 25–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/tal.2018.0320.
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This article calls attention to the essential translational aspect of linguistic experimentation in literary uses of African Englishes in colonial and postcolonial West African literature. It focuses mainly on the literature of the most linguistically diverse country in Africa – Nigeria. Drawing on the theoretical work of Itamar Even-Zohar, Lawrence Venuti, and Pierre Bourdieu, it demonstrates how the different Englishes used in this literature act in a translational way, relating and responding to cultural, political, and social contexts. Specific attention is paid to Amos Tutuola's use of interlanguage and diglossia; Chinua Achebe's manipulation of acts of code-switching and mixing; and how Ken Saro-Wiwa's development of a unique language of dissent in his novel Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English is built upon these earlier experimentations with translations between Englishes.
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Bandia, Paul F. "On Translating Pidgins and Creoles in African Literature." TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction 7, no. 2 (March 13, 2007): 93–114. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/037182ar.
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Abstract On Translating Pidgins and Creoles in African Literature — This paper deals with some of the problems of translating pidgins and creoles in African literature. It begins with an overview of the origins and parallel evolution of the French-based and English-based pidgins spoken in West Africa, throwing light on their status, history, and use in African literature. After a brief sociolinguistic analysis of the two hybrid languages, the paper discusses the difficulty of translating them, by carrying out a thorough analysis of translated examples and suggesting more appropriate solutions where necessary. The paper concludes by highlighting the reasons for the translation difficulties which are not only linguistic but also historical and ideological.
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Ibikunle, Tolulope. "Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith’s Translation Style in The Freedom Fight and Treasury of Childhood Memories." Yoruba Studies Review 7, no. 1 (July 26, 2022): 1–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/ysr.v7i1.131454.
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The steady but relentless globalization of the world makes translation highly pertinent to the understanding of different endeavors and spheres, from education and the economy to politics and religion. Thus, translation as a conduit for the transmission of knowledge protects and promotes tradition, culture and literature in our contemporary world. Consequently, translators are of utmost importance to the world at large and their immediate society in particular. Literary works exhibit diverse linguistic components, coupled with social, religious and cultural aspects of human existence, hence translation of literary works could be regarded as one of the main communicative approaches across cultures. Translating literary works, thus, constitutes many problems for the translator who is expected to be both bilingual/multilingual and bicultural/multicultural. Therefore, this essay will examine the roles and challenges of cultural and textual translation in the context of African society through the contribution and dexterity of Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith. Since the translation of literary work is also a form of adaptation and not pure language translation, attention will be placed on Smith's artistic prowess and translation techniques by analyzing two of her translated works. While reflecting on salient challenges of translation and the impacts of translating literary works from Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith's perspective, the essay aims to address some of the ways she gets to grips with the challenges to promote the Yorùbá language, culture, religion and tradition, as a translator. The essay concludes by advocating for better circulation, promotion and expansion of the cultural, philosophical, religious, political and social ideas of Africans through translations of literary works written in English, French and other languages into African languages and those written in African languages into English, French and other languages.
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Minter, Lobke. "Translation and South African English Literature: van Niekerk and Heyns' Agaat." English Today 29, no. 1 (February 27, 2013): 53–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s026607841200051x.
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English is in many ways the language that is assumed to be the giant in the South African literary field. The mere mention of South African literature has a different nuance to, let's say, African literature, since African literature has a vast array of national, colonial and post-colonial contexts, whereas South African literature is focused on one nation and one historical context. This difference in context is important when evaluating the use of English in South African Literature. In many ways, the South African literary field has grown, not only in number of contributors, and the diversity represented there, but also in genre or style. South African literature is becoming more fluid, more energetic, and more democratic in all the ways that the word implies. Writers like Lauren Beukes and Lily Herne are writing science fiction worlds where Cape Town is controlled by autocratic fascists or zombie wastelands that stretch from Table Mountain to Ratanga Junction; Deon Meyer writes crime thrillers, and Renesh Lakhan plumbs the depths of what it means to be South African after democracy. In many ways, the entire field of literature has changed in South Africa in the last twenty or so years. But one aspect has remained the same: the expectation, that while anyone who has anything to say at all, creatively, politically or otherwise, can by all means write it in their mother tongue, if the author wants to be read by more than a very specific fraction of society, then they need to embark on the perilous journey that is translation, and above all, translation into English.
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Midžić, Simona. "Responses to Toni Morrison's oeuvre in Slovenia." Acta Neophilologica 36, no. 1-2 (December 1, 2003): 49–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/an.36.1-2.49-61.
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Toni Morrison, the first African American female winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is certainly one of the modern artists whose novels have entered the world's modern literary canon. She is one of the most read novelists in the United States, where all of her novels have been bestsellers. However, only Song of Solomon and Beloved have so far been translated into Slovene. There have been several articles or essays written on Toni Morrison but most of them are simply translations of English articles; the only exception is a study by Jerneja Petrič. This paper presents the Slovene translation of Song ofSolomon by Jože Stabej and the articles written on Toni Morrison by Slovene critics. Jože Stabej is so far the only Slovene translator who has translated Toni Morrison. The author of this article uses some Slovene translations from the novel in comparison to the original to show the main differences appearing because of different grammatical structures of both languages and differences in the two cultures. The articles by Slovene critics are primarily resumes or translations of English originals and have been mainly published in magazines specializing in literature.
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Zajas, Pawel. "South goes East. Zuid-Afrikaanse literatuur bij Volk & Welt." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 57, no. 2 (October 9, 2020): 67–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/tl.v57i2.8324.
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The paper analyses the transfer of South African literature to the German Democratic Republic. In its historiographic/methodological dimension it presents findings on the statistics of (South) African literature(s) translations in the Verlag Volk und Welt (the major East German publisher in the area of contemporary world literature), and on the place of literary translations in the East German foreign cultural policy, as well as in the socialist solidarity discourse of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and the antiapartheid movement. Furthermore, findings are presented on the publisher-internal selection criteria applied to South African literature, based on the archival data from the Bundesarchiv in Berlin (i.e. applications for a print permit and internal/external reviews), on issues around the transformation and adaptation of literature translated in the realm of the East German Weltliteratur, and on the transfer of South African literature from the GDR, based on the English language series Seven Seas Books. Lastly, the function of this alternative canon, framed within the so-called ‘minor transnationalism’, is spelled out.
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Warner, Tobias. "How Mariama Bâ Became World Literature: Translation and the Legibility of Feminist Critique." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 131, no. 5 (October 2016): 1239–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2016.131.5.1239.
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How did Mariama Bâ‘s 1979 novel Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter) become one of the most widely read, taught, and translated African texts of the twentieth century? This essay traces how the Senegalese author's work became recognizable to a global audience as an attack on polygamy and a celebration of literary culture. I explore the flaws in these two conceptions of the novel, and I recover aspects of the text that were obscured along the way—especially the novel's critique of efforts to reform the legal framework of marriage in Senegal. I also compare striking shifts that occur in two key translations: the English edition that helped catalyze Bâ‘s success and a more recent translation into Wolof, the most widely spoken language in Senegal. By reading Letter back through these translations, I reposition it as a text that highlights its distance from an audience and transforms this distance into an animating contradiction.
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Kruger, Alet. "Translation, self-translation and apartheid-imposed conflict." Translation and the Genealogy of Conflict 11, no. 2 (June 8, 2012): 273–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jlp.11.2.06kru.
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Translation has played a major role alongside original literature in each of the South African languages in aiding the construction of their cultural and literary identities. Because of apartheid (literally, ‘apartness’), Afrikaans carried a political burden and literary authors in this language were considered the protectors of Afrikaner cultural and national identity. After outlining the historical origins and the consolidation of apartheid, this paper charts the emergence of a versetliteratuur (‘protest literature’) movement among disillusioned Afrikaans authors during the apartheid era. Growing censorship and the first banning of an Afrikaans novel under the 1974 Publications and Entertainment Act led to translation and self-translation (into English) being used as a tool of resistance by Afrikaans writers against the ideology of apartheid. The paper moves on to explore the effects of apartheid-imposed conflict on other authors such as South African authors writing in English. It then focuses on the ideological agenda informing the language policy-makers’ and Africanists’ selection of books to be translated into African languages, as part of the government’s attempts to promote mother tongue education in African schools and thus perpetuate the segregation of black South Africans. The concluding section discusses how changes in political life since 1990 have influenced the use of translation in South African literature.
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Mastropierro, Lorenzo, and Kathy Conklin. "Racism and dehumanisation in Heart of Darkness and its Italian translations: A reader response analysis." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 28, no. 4 (November 2019): 309–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947019884450.
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This article presents the results of a reader response study of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and two of its Italian translations. Specifically, data from an online questionnaire are used to test whether English and Italian readers respond differently to the potential racist implications of the fictional representation of the African natives. Whereas one translator removes completely all occurrences of nigger( s) and negro, the other adds additional uses of the slurs which are not present in the original. We explore with empirical methods whether these translational alterations have an effect on the readers’ perception of dehumanisation, discrimination and racism in the text, comparing responses to each translation with responses to the original. Our findings not only show evidence of significant differences in the responses between one translation and the original but also suggest that other linguistic and extra-linguistic factors could be influencing readers’ response. With this article, we aim to contribute to the under-researched application of reader response approaches to translation studies.
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Waliaula, Ken Walibora. "The Afterlife of Oyono's Houseboy in the Swahili Schools Market: To Be or Not to Be Faithful to the Original." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 128, no. 1 (January 2013): 178–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2013.128.1.178.
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Africa, the world's second-largest continent, speaks over two thousand languages but rarely translates itself. it is no wonder, therefore, that Ferdinand Oyono's francophone African classic Une vie de boy (1956), translated into at least twelve European and Asian languages, exists in only one African translation—that is, if we consider as non-African Oyono's original French and the English, Arabic, and Portuguese into which it was translated. Since 1963, when Obi Wali stated in his essay “The Dead End of African Literature” that African literature in English and French was “a clear contradiction, and a false proposition,” like “Italian literature in Hausa” (14), the question of the language of African literature has animated debate. Two decades later, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o restated Wali's contention, asserting that European languages led to African “spiritual subjugation” (9). Ngũgĩ argued strongly that African literature should be written in African languages. On the other hand, Chinua Achebe defended European languages, maintaining that they could “carry the weight of African experience” (62).
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Yan, Yan. "CHINESE TRANSLATION OF CULTURE-LOADED WORDS IN AFRICAN ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF ECO-TRANSLATOLOGY: A CASE STUDY OF GURNAH’S BY THE SEA." International Journal of Education Humanities and Social Science 06 (2023): 284–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.54922/ijehss.2023.0596.
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African English literature is the most influential branch of African literature, carrying the history, culture, and politics of African countries, so the translation research of culture-loaded words in African English literature is of great practical significance. This paper takes Eco-Translatology as the theoretical guide to analyzing the strategies and methods adopted by the Chinese translator of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea in the process of adaptation and selection of culture-loaded words in the three dimensions of language, culture, and communication, with a view to providing insights for translation studies in African English literature.
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Rizzi, Giovanni. "African and Rwandan Translations of the Bible." Między Oryginałem a Przekładem 27, no. 3(53) (September 21, 2021): 85–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.12797/moap.27.2021.53.05.
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The article offers a concise presentation of the project linked to the Library Fund of the Pontifical Urbaniana University, namely, to study the inculturation of the Christian faith by relating the documentation on the editions of the Bible to the catechisms in the territories entrusted to the pastoral care of the Congregation for Evangelization of peoples. The vastness of the project itself is marked today by the difficulty of using more extensive documentation than that present in the Fund of the same Library. However, more limited segments of the indicated material of interest can already be identified. More specifically, the African continent shows quite a varied phenomenology of the editions of the Bible: from translations of the Latin Vulgate into local languages, to translations from English or French, themselves translations from Latin. In the post-conciliar period, the translations of the Bible from the original biblical languages emerge. This is the case of the Kinyarwanda versions of the NT (1988, 1989) and of the OT-NT in a single volume (1990, 1992), in which, alongside pastoral purposes, the results of modern biblical exegesis are evident, to the point of proposing categorizations of literary bodies of biblical literature from an interconfessional and also interreligious perspective.
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Scaramella, Evelyn. "Imagining Andalusia: Race, Translation, and the Early Critical Reception of Federico García Lorca in the U.S." Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 41, no. 2 (January 10, 2017): 417–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.18192/rceh.v41i2.2159.
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A través del estudio de las primeras traducciones de la obra de Federico García Lorca al inglés, este artículo analiza la imagen de Andalucía, con su herencia africana y árabe, en los Estados Unidos. Al examinar una selección de reseñas que aparecieron en las revistas literarias americanas entre 1929 y 1936, demuestro que los elementos andaluces de la obra de Lorca llevaron en ocasiones a que el público estadounidense creara estereotipos de la cultura española como racialmente diferente, lo cual afectó la recepción crítica de la obra temprana de Lorca en inglés. Palabras clave: García Lorca, raza, traducción, Andalucía, recepción crítica This article examines the perception of Andalusia, with its African and Arabic past, in the United States by using a case study that analyzes the early English translations of Federico García Lorca’s work. Through a selection of reviews appearing in American literary magazines between 1929 and 1936, I show that the Andalusian elements of Lorca’s poems and plays at times caused the American public to stereotype Spanish culture as racially different, thus affecting the critical success of his early work in English translation. Keywords: García Lorca, race, translation, Andalusia, critical reception
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Nyarko, Gifty Akua, and Rita Ndonibi. "The Journey of Adoption and Adaptation: A Reading of The Tight Game, Sola Owonibi’s Translation of Akinwumi Isola’s Ó Le Kú." Yoruba Studies Review 7, no. 1 (July 26, 2022): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/ysr.v7i1.131458.
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Language has long defined the discourse of African literature. Africa’s colonial experience has left its enduring legacy of colonial languages which have been imbibed to the detriment of the usage of indigenous African languages. Accordingly, even in the creation of literary works, the African writer has had to resort to the colonial languages as the medium of expression. Since it is implausible to think of the literature of a people outside the context of their languages, there has arisen a debate on the appropriate language that can be used in African literary expressions. One school of thought represented by Wali and Ngugi see it as absurd to refer as ‘African’, a literary work whose medium of expression is English (a foreign language). They argue that for any literary work to be truly “African”, it has to be written in an African indigenous language. Wali posits that until African writers come to terms with writing literary works in native languages they pursue a dead end. Ngugi also opines that language is so deeply rooted in culture that decolonization is impossible as long as English or any colonial language remain the medium of expression. He argues that using English as the medium of African literary expression amounts to linguistic imperialism. Achebe on the other hand, believes that African writers should embrace writing African literature in any foreign language because this offers African writers a useful means of reaching a wider audience and ensuring African literature a prominent space in the global literary landscape. There is also the alternative of African writers threading the middle ground in this debate by adopting and adapting the foreign language through translating from the foreign language to the local and vice versa to reach a wider audience, achieve universal intelligibility and acceptability. This review essay takes the position that African writers can use the tool of translation to promote the local languages through the process of adoption and adaptation.
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Hijjo, Nael F. M., and Harold M. Lesch. "Reframing the Islamic glossary in the English translations of the Arabic editorials." FORUM / Revue internationale d’interprétation et de traduction / International Journal of Interpretation and Translation 19, no. 2 (December 31, 2021): 105–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/forum.20019.hij.
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Abstract This paper investigated contemporary journalistic English translations of Arabic Islamic terms and concepts in light of the current civil wars in the Middle East and North Africa, and the war on terror as well as Islamophobia and the refugee crisis. It studied the critical role of translation agencies in reframing and renegotiating the Islamic glossary through their own lens, which may be ideologically positioned. The paper further examined the English translations of the Arabic Islamic terms and concepts in the target texts which were published by the Washington-based advocacy group the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). The data were collected manually from MEMRI’s online archive from the years 2013 to 2016. The data selection was based on a designed search that linked Daesh (ISIS) and any of its aliases with any of the Islamic terms and concepts which are repeatedly used in media narratives within the context of the ‘war on terror’ and ‘Islamic extremism’. The study employed Baker’s (2006) narrative-informed theory and Newmark’s (1988) translation procedures taxonomy to assist in the data analysis. The findings suggested that transference (transliteration) is a significant procedure used by MEMRI in justifying, legitimizing and normalizing particular narratives to the public and that translators are decisive participants in constituting and informing the social and political reality. The findings also demonstrated that narrativity features, relationality in particular, are significant tools in reconstructing reality in translation. Through translation, MEMRI draws upon the metanarrative of the ‘war on terror’ in promoting its ideologically laden agenda of terrorist Arabs and Muslims.
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Staphorst, Luan. ""The Language of the Eye Is Not the Language of the Ear": English, Translationality, and (Dis)Similarities between Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Devil on the Cross." Research in African Literatures 54, no. 2 (June 2024): 58–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/ral.00004.
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ABSTRACT: Against the backdrop of the 60th anniversary of the African Writers Conference and the perennial question of English as an "African language," this article investigates the ways in which English has been used within the literary writings of Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. An overview of the (seemingly) divergent views on English articulated by Achebe and Ngũgĩ is presented, and two of their novels, namely Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Ngũgĩ's Devil on the Cross , are then situated within the frame of translationality. Extracts from the two novels are comparatively analyzed and discussed with reference to translation theory, specifically "thick translation," " omdigting ," and "foreignization," in relation to their lexical and ideological treatment of English. The article concludes that despite the differences in attitude toward English expressed in their polemical and philosophical writings, their literary treatment of English points to a number of similarities.
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Ibrahim, Binta Fatima. "The appropriation of linguistic forms for better cognitive comprehension of the Nigerian pragmatic literature." Babel. Revue internationale de la traduction / International Journal of Translation 56, no. 2 (August 13, 2010): 119–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/babel.56.2.02ibr.
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The propensity of the English language to absorb native nuances by the African writers should be seen as a worthwhile stylistic device, despite the position of English language. Its adaptability to natural flavours should therefore be aimed at the writers’ intention to reach a wider audience. This also means that the attempt by writers to decolorize through literature the polluted African culture god through the use of appropriate notions and local nuances. The technique has, however, been to put on record traditional ways of life, the peoples’ customs, communal activities such as festivals, ceremonies, rituals, myths, folktales, proverbs, music, dance, songs, etc. in order to remind the African reader about the importance of these crucial aspects of the tradition in addition to the appropriation of language use. Hence most African writings can be said to have their foundations in the cultural heritage of their various groups. through the use of what one may call technically implanted African English, African coinages, direct translation, proverbs, local idioms transfers of mother tongues, local insertions/ect. Hence it is not enough to use the sociological and residual approaches to literature. The formalist and pragmatic approaches should also be considered paramount in the writing of African literature. For the choice of diction, narrative technique and the entire pragma-aesthetic implications of the African man’s speech is important to the reader of African literature, if he is to understand the theme
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Lipenga, Timwa. "La Traduction et l’alternance de code linguistique dans la musique de Yemi Alade." International Journal of Francophone Studies 24, no. 3 (December 1, 2021): 221–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ijfs_00039_1.
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This article focuses on the links between translation and code-switching in selected songs by Yemi Alade. The songs under study were originally composed and interpreted in English before being translated into French. The original lyrics do not translate the instances where Yoruba and Igbo code-switching occurs, whereas the French versions frequently translate such instances. The article argues that these translations of code-switching serve to re-examine preconceived notions about a song and its translation. The argument demonstrates that it is possible for a song to ‘gain’ in translation, and this is illustrated by Alade’s translated songs. The article also focuses on the extent to which the Derridean perspective of the supplement and that of différance can be applied to music translation. The four songs ‘Johnny’, ‘K-I-S-S-I-N-G’, ‘Africa’ and ‘Ferrari’ have been chosen because they feature instances of code-switching. The article looks at the degree to which one can talk about loss during translation and the supplementary meanings of language in the four songs. finally, it reflects on the implications of linguistic choices for a musician in postcolonial Africa; ordinarily, African writers are the ones who are interrogated regarding language choice, but the question of language is one which confronts every form of art on the continent.
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Nneka, Ugagu-Dominic. "Translating Postcolonial Europhone African Literature: The German translation of Chimamanda Adichie's Purple Hibiscus." Reci Beograd 15, no. 16 (2023): 55–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.5937/reci2316055n.
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Literary hybridity necessitated by cultural differences is a distinct feature of Postcolonial Europhone African Literatures. This is evident in Chimamanda Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2000). This paper examines the hybridity in the source text (ST) and their translation from English into German. Instances of hybridity in the source text and their translation were identified. This highlights the translation strategies in the process of analyzing the translation choices and their implications, especially in transferring culture-specific elements in the source text into the target text (TT). Some challenges of intercultural translation are discussed in relation to the reflection of the author's style in literary translation. The paper reveals the consciousness of the translator to preserve the culture-specific elements that portray the author's culture and purpose through the adoption of ethnocentric strategies. Nida's equivalence theory was adopted to examine the translation of cultural phrases to determine how they were transferred to German language, and also discuss the implications of some choices made by the translator in propelling intercultural dialogue through translation. The study concludes that the translator's effort to strike a balance between the source and the target text was challenged as a result of inability to provide explanation for some unexplained culture-specific terms of vernacular origin in the source text.
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Sanz Jiménez, Miguel. "TRANSLATING AFRICAN-AMERICAN NEO-SLAVE NARRATIVES: BLACK ENGLISH IN THE GOOD LORD BIRD AND THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD." Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, no. 24 (2020): 203–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/ren.2020.i24.10.
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This paper studies how two recent neo-slave narratives have been translated into Spanish: The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride, and The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. Since they were both published simultaneously in Spain in September 2017, special attention is paid to the strategies used to render Black English, which marks slaves’ otherness, in the target polysystem. An overview of the origin, rise, and evolution of neo-slave narratives precedes the features of African-American Vernacular English portrayed in the novels that belong to this sub-genre. After some insights into the issue of translating literary dialect, the risks it entails, and the different strategies that can be used, the Spanish versions of McBride’s and Whitehead’s works are analyzed accordingly and contrasted.
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Camps, Assumpta. "Reseña del libro Decolonizing Translation: Francophone African Novels in English Translation." TRANSFER 5, no. 2 (September 22, 2017): 68–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1344/transfer.2010.5.68-74.
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Che, Suh Joseph. "Hibridization, Linguistic and Stylistic Innovation in Cameroonian Literature and Implications for Translation." Studies in Linguistics and Literature 3, no. 2 (May 17, 2019): p165. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/sll.v3n2p165.
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Drawing from Cameroonian drama written in French and translated into English, this paper demonstrates how Cameroonian literature written in European languages and translated into other European languages is characterized by linguistic and stylistic innovation. It examines the reasons and motivations underlying this phenomenon, first from the perspective of the ambivalent situation of the Cameroonian and African writer writing not in his native language but rather in a European language, and secondly in the light of the prevailing literary creative trend and attitude of Cameroonian and, indeed, African writers in general. In this context, it is argued and posited that Cameroonian literary works are heavily tinted with linguistic and stylistic innovations such that the source texts actually intervene and exert considerable influence on the mode of their translation into the target language, particularly if the translator is to preserve the Cameroonian/African aesthetic which informs them and constitutes their driving force.
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Kruger, Liam. "World, Class, Tragicomedy: Johannesburg, 1994." College Literature 50, no. 2-3 (March 2023): 349–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a902222.
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Abstract: Marlene van Niekerk's 1994 Triomf is a plaasroman , or farm novel, without the farm; it formally resembles a nostalgic pastoral genre initiated by the collapse of Southern African agricultural economy around the time of the Great Depression, but removes even the symbol of the farm as aesthetic compensation for material loss. In the process, van Niekerk composes a post-apartheid tragicomedy of a lumpenproletariat white supremacist family coming into long-belated class consciousness, an epiphany which, surprisingly, survives the novel's translations from Afrikaans to South African English to 'international' English. Crucially, this understanding is mediated by a critical tendency to appraise Triomf in the context of Faulkner and the Southern Gothic, a generic comparison which gets a lot wrong but is ultimately very revealing, less about Triomf than about the imperial world-system through which it circulates and is consecrated. Consequently, the novel stages globally what seems at first to be a parochial question: how is one supposed to imagine democratic reconciliation and integration after apartheid, when one of the classes to be reconciled lacks historical self-consciousness and has no obvious place in either the apartheid regime or the post-apartheid dispensation? By analyzing van Niekerk's novel and the institutions which consecrate it, the paper fleshes out critiques of world-literary hermeneutics, specifically for its naive handling of genre and context, and of post-apartheid 'reconciliation' under capital.
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Kamau, Nicholas Goro. "The metatext of culture and the limits of translation in Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s Devil on the Cross (1982)." Research Journal in Advanced Humanities 3, no. 2 (July 4, 2022): 16–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.58256/rjah.v3i2.825.
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This paper examines Ngũgĩ’s translation of his first Gĩkũyũ language novel Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ into English, with a view to showing how the author translates Gĩkũyũ culture and idiom into English. Starting from the premise that the act of literary creation inevitably starts within a culture, the paper proceeds from the position advanced by Nadine Gordimer that literature in indigenous African languages must be confident that it can connect with the literary culture of the outside world on its own terms (2003, p. 7). The paper goes further to shows how Ngũgĩ attempts to ensure that his translation of the novel into English does not become complicit with the linguistic and cultural hegemony of the English language while at the same time making sure that the translated text is intelligible to the English reading public. This shows the primacy of the indigenous gnosis, its language and worldview in Ngũgĩ’s practice as a writer and translator and the foremost advocate of writing in African indigenous languages. The paper comes to the conclusion that Ngũgĩ’s translation of the novel into English as Devil on the Cross makes deliberate efforts to resist the absorption of the indigenous culture and language by English.
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Ogbeide-Ihama, Mojisola A. "Amos Tutuola’s Palm Wine Drinkard and the Challenges of Translating A Hybrid Literature." African Journal of Stability and Development (AJSD) 11, no. 1 (2018): 157–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.53982/ajsd.2018.1101.10-j.
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Literary translation is the art of recreating a literary text in another language while using the source text as a medium. Translation in contemporary times has gone beyond mere linguistic transfer: it is now a veritable means of cultural transfer. Language being the vehicle of culture, translation therefore consists in conveying in a target language concepts and symbolisms of culture through a system of representation. Every literary work being a cultural product, often resists translation. Thus, translating works from English speaking African literature proves to be a difficult task as it poses some peculiar challenges. The aim of this work is to examine the diverse challenges encountered in the process of translating the sense and the style of The Palm-Wine Drinkard, a novel written by Amos Tutuola and translated as L’ivrogne dans la brousse by Raymond Queneau. In order to facilitate our discussion, we will be doing a comparative analysis of the original version and its translated version. The study concludes that at the base of translation is culture and language and that no matter the challenges posed in the process of translation, one must endeavour to safeguard the linguistic and cultural specificity of the text as well as ensure that the source and the target texts communicate the same message.
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Alhamad, Anoud Abdulaziz. "Postcolonial Literature and Translation: A Grounded Commonality of Multiculturalism." World Journal of English Language 12, no. 6 (September 26, 2022): 514. http://dx.doi.org/10.5430/wjel.v12n6p514.
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The study theorizes that multiculturalism is a grounded commonality and a contact zone of postcolonial literature and translation. It concentrates on some of the common cultural aspects in the fields. Therefore, this study aims to emphasize the multiculturalism of postcolonial literary text compared to some multicultural features of translation. The study looks into how the cultural differences travel in the inter-lingual translation of the postcolonial literature from English to African. In postcolonial literature, the cultural aspect plays the role of otherness in the text and shows the ethical aspect of translation as it reveals the presence of others. During translation, cultural difference is, therefore, the substance of postcolonial literature. The paper recommends studying the inter-lingual translation of postcolonial literature in terms of the paradoxical status of monolingual literature in which cultural difference is seen as a spectral presence of other languages.
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Nabea, Wendo. "Mediation between Linguistic Hegemony and Periphery Languages in the Nobel Prize for Literature." Journal of Higher Education in Africa 19, no. 2 (July 14, 2022): 77–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.57054/jhea.v19i2.2180.
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This article explores the Nobel Prize for Literature as an embodiment of Western hegemony, despite its universal disposition. It demonstrates that the award is prestigious and canonises selected literary works as quintessential, as well as offering social and economic benefits to authors. However, the article contends that there are ideological and geopolitical considerations apart from quality that are addressed by the Swedish Academy to identify the winner every year, chief among them being the language of writing. The article demonstrates that literary works that are apt to win are generally those that are written in the dominant languages of the metropolis, especially English. It further cast doubts on the chances of winning for writers who use marginal languages, for example, African national languages, considering that even translations tend to misrepresent texts in the source language. The article avers that the Nobel Prize epitomises hegemony, language being a key component. Using postcolonial theory, the article further lays bare how writers use marginal languages to mediate with linguistic hegemony through appropriation, abrogation and evolution of argots. The article asserts that the Swedish Academy needs to rethink the question of language in awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature or else it can become displaced and parochialised as users of minor languages negotiate with it.
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Cloete, W., and M. Wenzel. "Translating culture: Matthee’s Kringe in ’n bos as a case in point." Literator 28, no. 3 (July 30, 2007): 1–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v28i3.166.
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The translation of “cultural identity” in a novel such as “Kringe in ’n bos” contributes towards the definition of a uniquely South African representation of time and space in the global context. When translation is studied as a product of its socio-historical context, the translator is faced with problems of translating ideology and cultural identity in literature. Realia constitute a particular challenge to the translator because, according to the definition, precise equivalents of these words do not exist in other languages, which could cause shifts in the target language text. This article considers the concept of translatability and concludes that, despite the problems encountered, an adequate and satisfactory German translation from the Afrikaans original should be possible. The question of translatability assumes an interesting dimension as the Afrikaans novel was translated into English by the author herself. The privileged position of author-translator granted Matthee a near-perfect understanding of the different layers of meaning and intention of the source text and eliminated the gap between the author and translator. However, one gains the impression that the German translator (Stege) resorted to transference as a strategy to avoid translation and it emerges that most instances of definite mistranslations are, indeed, attributable to Stege’s unfamiliarity with the South African context.
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Kruger, Haidee. "The translation of cultural aspects in South African children's literature in Afrikaans and English: a micro-analysis." Perspectives 21, no. 2 (June 2013): 156–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0907676x.2011.608850.
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Swanepoel, C. F. "Interdissiplinêre taal- en literatuurstudie in Suid-Afrika." Literator 12, no. 2 (May 6, 1991): 35–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v12i2.757.
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Interdisciplinary cooperation as an option flows from a fundamental adjustment of public thinking in the country, and from the belief that it could possibly contribute to the dynamic survival of smaller departments under the threat of rationalisation. Several initiatives during the 1980s, especially from the HSRC, serve as a foundation for future planning. While not implying the disappearance of individual departments, interdisciplinary work does require a sharing of common experiences and a greater interaction between departments. It also implies the raising of the status of secondary sources, including translations of literary works. As an international vehicle, English could serve as common medium in interdisciplinary interaction. While neighbouring departments are free to devise their own programmes, preference should be given to national priorities, such as South African spoken language and historical-comparative literary studies. The need for training for comparative work, coordination, adequate funding, professional liaison and lobbying, may compel language and literature associations to federate in an umbrella body, especially in the wake of the rationalisation of the Institute for Research into Language and the Arts at the HSRC.
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Bigon, Liora, and Edna Langenthal. "Tirailleurs Sénégalais in Modern Hebrew Poetry: Nathan Alterman." Humanities 12, no. 6 (December 1, 2023): 142. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h12060142.
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This article expands on a poem written by one of the central figures in modern Hebrew literature, Nathan Alterman (1910–1970), entitled “About a Senegalese Soldier” (1945). Providing the first English translation of this poem and its first (academic) discussion in any language, the article analyzes the poem against contemporary geopolitical, historical, and literary backgrounds. The article’s transdisciplinary approach brings together imperial and colonial studies, African studies, and (Hebrew) literature studies. This unexpected combination adds originality to mainstream postcolonial perspectives through which the agency of the Senegalese riflemen [Tirailleurs sénégalais] has been often discussed in scholarly research. By using a rich variety of primary and secondary sources, the article also contributes to a more elaborated interpretation of Alterman’s poetry. This is achieved through embedding the poem on the tirailleur in a tripartite geopolitical context: local (British Mandate Palestine/Eretz-Israel), regional (the Middle East), and international (France-West Africa). The cultural histories and literary traditions in question are not normally cross-referenced in the relevant research literature and are less obvious to the anglophone reader.
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Carrim, Ameera, and Sibhekinkosi Anna Nkomo. "A Systematic Literature Review of the Feasibility of a Translanguaging Pedagogy in the Foundation Phase." Journal of Languages and Language Teaching 11, no. 2 (April 25, 2023): 195. http://dx.doi.org/10.33394/jollt.v11i2.7158.
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Many South African educational contexts, including the Foundation Phase are linguistically diverse. However, this diversity is not mostly catered for as evidenced by the prevalent monoglossic ideologies. This has resulted in low literacy levels in South Africa, which indicate a poor literacy foundation and limit learners’ ability to learn effectively and excel academically. Over the past decade, a number of literacy intervention programmes have been implemented at national and provincial level, but the impact has been minimal. There is need to explore and adopt other approaches to literacy development such as the translanguaging pedagogy which has been reported to be successful in other phases of education. However, there has not yet been studies that report on translanguaging undertaken at Foundation Phase in South Africa. Thus, this study explored the feasibility of a translanguaging pedagogy in the Foundation Phase to develop literacy for multilingual English first additional language learners. Through a systematic review, translanguaging studies conducted between the years 2015-2022 in South Africa and internationally were reviewed and analysed using a thematic analysis approach. Finding from this study reveal that learners’ home language should be considered as a resource for attaining deeper levels of meaning. By adopting a translanguaging approach, teachers can enhance multilingual learners’ literacy skills through strategies such as home-languaging, translation, juxtaposing languages and the flexible and dynamic use of the multimodal semiotic repertoire. However, future research is recommended to investigate the application of this pedagogy in the Foundation Phase classrooms in South Africa.
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Noomé, Idette. "Re-membering Local African History – Translating the Biography of Muhlaba I of the VaNkuna into English." Journal of Literary Studies 34, no. 3 (July 3, 2018): 36–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02564718.2018.1507156.
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Reddick, Yvonne. "Tchibamba, Stanley and Conrad: postcolonial intertextuality in Central African fiction." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 56, no. 2 (October 18, 2019): 54–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.56i2.5639.
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Paul Lomami Tchibamba (1914–85) is often described as the Congo’s first novelist. Previous research in French and English has depicted Tchibamba’s work as a straightforward example of ‘writing back’ to the colonial canon. However, this article advances scholarship on Tchibamba’s work by demonstrating that his later writing responds not only to Henry Morton Stanley’s account of the imperial subjugation of the Congo, but to Joseph Conrad’s questioning of colonialist narratives of ‘progress’. Drawing on recent theoretical work that examines intertextuality in postcolonial fiction, this article demonstrates that while Tchibamba is highly critical of Stanley, he enters into dialogue with Conrad’s exposure of colonial brutality. Bringing together comparative research insights from Congolese and European literatures, this article also employs literary translation. This is the first time that excerpts from two of Tchibamba’s most important responses to colonial authors have been translated into English. Also for the first time, Tchibamba’s novella Ngemena is shown to be a crucial postcolonial Congolese response to Heart of Darkness. Through close textual analysis of Tchibamba’s use of irony and imagery, this article’s key findings are that, while Tchibamba nuances Conrad’s disparaging portrait of a chief, he develops the ironic mode of Conrad’s An Outpost of Progress, and updates the journey upriver into the interior in Heart of Darkness. This article illustrates the complex and nuanced way in which Tchibamba interacts with his European intertexts, deploying close analyses of his responses to Conradian imagery.
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Mal Mazou, Oumarou. "Fulani Oral Literature and (Un)translatability: The Case of Northern Cameroon Mbooku Poems." Territoires, histoires, mémoires 28, no. 1-2 (October 23, 2017): 109–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1041652ar.
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This paper sets out to examine the translatability of Fulani oral poetry from Northern Cameroon, especially the mbooku genre, in a literary perspective. The corpus is gathered from selected oral poems that were transcribed and translated into German, English and French by different translators. The study reveals that it is possible to translate Fulani poems into European languages so that the target texts perform the same literary functions as the source texts, in spite of linguistic and cultural difficulties that occur during the transfer process. Thus, the author proposes a retranslation in which the content meets the form, taking into account some patterns of European modern poetry. He therefore advocates for retranslations of these poems from a purely literary perspective and would like to see translation studies focus more on the primary source of African orality.
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Kruger, Haidee. "Child and adult readers’ processing of foreign elements in translated South African picturebooks." Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 25, no. 2 (May 17, 2013): 180–227. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/target.25.2.03kru.
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The tension between domesticating and foreignising translation strategies is particularly strongly felt in the translation of children’s literature, and has been a key issue in many studies of such literature. However, despite the pervasiveness of the concepts, there is little existing empirical research investigating how child (and adult) readers of translated children’s books process and respond to for eignised elements in translation. This means that scholars’ arguments in favour of either domestication or foreignisation in the translation of children’s literature are often based on intuition and personal experience, with no substantial empirical basis. This article presents the findings of an experiment undertaken to investigate Afrikaans child and adult readers’ processing of and responses to potentially linguistically and culturally foreign textual elements in translated children’s picturebooks, against the background of postcolonial/neocolonial cultural and linguistic hybridity in South Africa. The paper reports the results relating to two of the research questions informing the study: Does the use of foreignised elements in translated children’s picturebooks have any significant effect on the cognitive effort involved in reading for child and adult readers? Is the comprehension of child and adult readers affected by the use of for eignised elements in translated children’s picturebooks? A reading study utilising eye-tracking was conducted, involving both child and adult participants reading manipulated domesticated and foreignised versions of pages from two picturebooks translated from English to Afrikaans. To answer research question (1), data obtained by means of eye-tracking were analysed for dwell time, fixation count, first fixation duration and glances count for areas of interest (AOIs) reflecting domesticating or foreignising translation strategies. In order to answer question (2), short structured questionnaires or interviews with participants were used, focusing on the degree of comprehension of the two texts. Overall, the findings of the experiment demonstrate that while there are perceptible effects on processing and comprehension associated with the use of foreignising strategies, these effects are not straightforward or uniform, with notable differences not only for different AOIs, but also for child and adult readers.
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Murphy, Elena Rodríguez. "New Transatlantic African Writing: Translation, Transculturation and Diasporic Images in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck and Americanah." Prague Journal of English Studies 6, no. 1 (July 26, 2017): 93–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/pjes-2017-0006.
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Abstract Described as one of the leading voices of her generation, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has become one of the many African authors who through their narratives have succeeded in challenging the literary canon both in Europe and North America while redefining African literature from the diaspora. Her specific use of the English language as well as transcultural writing strategies allow Adichie to skilfully represent what it means to live as a “translated being”. In her collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), and her latest novel, Americanah (2013), which were greatly influenced by her own experiences as what she has referred to as “an inhabitant of the periphery”, Adichie depicts the way in which different Nigerian characters live in-between Nigeria and America. In this regard, her characters’ transatlantic journeys imply a constant movement between several languages and cultural backgrounds which result in cultural and linguistic translation.
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Gray, S. "Some notes on further readings of Wilma Stockenström’s slave narrative, The Expedition to the Baobab Tree." Literator 12, no. 1 (May 6, 1991): 51–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v12i1.745.
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This article considers some aspects of Wilma Stockenström’s novella of 1981, Die Kremetartekspedisie, in its English translation by J.M. Coetzee of 1983, The Expedition to the Baobab Tree. After isolating the formal aspects which are characteristic of the structure of the work, as explained by the author in the text, it reviews and identifies a general reluctance in the responses to date to engage with the text in terms it sets for itself. Arising out of this deadlock situation, the article suggests some approaches which could more appropriately be applied in further readings of the work. These are with regard to the author’s use of: (a) received South African history and (b) narrative mode, both of which contribute to the beginnings of the formation of a new, particularly female, consciousness and scope in South African fiction.
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Oriola, Titilope Oluwaseun. "Re-performing African Literature: A Review of Owonibi’s Translation of three Yoruba Literary works into English – Chief Gaa, Delusion of Grandeur and The Tight Game." Yoruba Studies Review 7, no. 1 (July 26, 2022): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/ysr.v7i1.131455.
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Re-performance, the way works of arts are translated into another language with distinct rules and principles yet preserving the aesthetics and values of the original texts, is a major aesthetic resource used by writers to establish their perspectives on translation. Jacobson’s school of descriptive translation is the theoretical framework for this review essay. The dataset include Adébáyọ Fálétí’s Basọrun Gáà, Ọládẹjọ Òkédìjí’s Àjà Ló lerù, and Akínwùmí Ìsọlá’s Ó Le Kú. This is designed to investigate level of re-performance through linguistic equivalence and socio-cultural thematic preservation. The translation of these works from the indigenous Yoruba language to the English language, in no small measure increases its appeal yet preserving its contextual essence and values. It featured prominently the use of structural simple sentences, functional declarative and interrogative sentences. Proverbs, witty sayings, eulogy and figures of speech which were translated to have a contextual equivalence with the original texts.
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Bernstein, Charles. "NoOnesRose: An Interview with Pierre Joris." boundary 2 50, no. 4 (November 1, 2023): 1–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10694127.
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Abstract Pierre Joris discusses his literary journey from Luxembourg to Bard College to Algeria to Paris and London and finally New York. Joris focuses on his translation of Paul Celan, his engagement with the poetry of the Maghreb (culminating in his coediting of The University of California Book of North African Literature, volume 4 of Poems for the Millennium), and the importance of French poet Edmond Jabès. He goes on to address his choice to write in his fourth language, English, and the formative readings of American poetry and his connection to some of the New American Poets of the generation older than him. In the course of the interview, Joris discusses his sense of a nomadic community—or perhaps better to say “negative” or “inoperable” community. Throughout, he comes back to his commitments to writing poetry and to translation as the core the practice of poetry.
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Makhudu, Khekheti. "Sol T. Plaatje's paremiological quest: a common humanity in cultural diversity." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 55, no. 1 (January 26, 2018): 149–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.55i1.1941.
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Having written and compiled from memory, over 700 Setswana proverbs when he was briefly resident in London, around the 1900s, Sol T. Plaatje exhibited unusual ethnographic knowledge and remarkable, creative translation skills in diaspora-like circumstances. While most literary researchers attest to those achievements, few have been the theories that account sufficiently for Plaatje's multilingual proverb renditions. The view propounded here is that Plaatje's paremiological enterprise was probably never only an exercise of his polyglot abilities. Rather his quest appears to have been to assert the cultural similarities and convergences between African and European people's histories. His socio-political beliefs propelled deep pride over his Setswana identity and became the driving force for highlighting the human bonds among nations of the North and the South. For Plaatje, seeing the overlaps and equivalences in and through the proverbs of the Dutch, English, French, Germans and the Batswana peoples, firstly validated orality as the bedrock of modern literary expression. Secondly, the relationship of the two seemed to recapitulate the communicative connections among people and their languages, across time and space. Lastly, the paper makes the point that Plaatje's search for unity in the cultural diversity as exhibited in his 1916 Diane tsa Setswana collection and the 1924 A Sechuana Reader stories, provides instructive lessons that present-day South Africa would ill afford to ignore considering the social cohesion challenges the nation faces.
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Adéyemi, O̩lálérè. "Literary Translation Techniques in Professor Pamela Smith’s Translation of Akinwumi Is̩ola’s Ogun Omode to Treasury of Childhood Memories." Yoruba Studies Review 7, no. 1 (July 26, 2022): 1–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/ysr.v7i1.131453.
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Literary translation is a veritable tool to mitigate the endangerment and imminent extinction of African indigenous languages and literature. Professor Pamela Smith has taken up the challenge to translate Ogún O̩mo̩dé written by Professor Akinwumi Is̩o̩la into Treasury of Childhood Memories among many others. Yorùbá literary critics, translation experts, and linguists are yet to scrutinize the literary translation techniques in the translated text. This study, therefore, examined the literary techniques adopted by the translator in the Target Language (TL). The study employed a qualitative research design with a close reading and content analysis of both the Second Language (SL) and Target Language (TL) texts using the Hutardo’ (2002, 498) model of literary techniques for data analysis. The findings of the study showed that: the translator adopted many literary techniques that make the TL fascinating and pleasurable to readers, but the following techniques were more predominant, these are modulation; compression; elision/omission; linguistic amplification; borrowing, calque; compensation; adaptation; and particularization. The essay concluded that the translator's high level of bilingual and bicultural competence and the literary translation techniques adopted to make the contents of the source text easily transposed and rendered in impeccable English language in the TL.
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Mbonyingingo, Audace, Olena Moiseyenko, and Dmytro Mazin. "The Representation of Psychological War-Related Traumas in the Literary Works of Contemporary Burundian and Ukrainian Writers: African and European Perspectives." Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal, no. 10 (December 28, 2023): 89–119. http://dx.doi.org/10.18523/kmhj270983.2023-10.89-119.
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The article explores the representation of psychological traumas afflicted by war in contemporary literary writing by Burundian (African) and Ukrainian (European) authors who were witnesses of the events described in their works. Based on the existing linguistic and psychological theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of a mental wound, a comparative perspective is provided on the nature, literary, and linguistic manifestations of psychological trauma in Burundian novels by Antoine Kaburahe and Marie-Therese Toyi, presenting the tragic, but stoic experience during the civil war in the East African country, and the shocked, but resilient experience of Ukrainian civilians during the full-scale aggression of the russian federation in the Ukrainian diary (Serhiy Zhadan) and essay writing (Ilya Kaminsky, Ludmila Khersonsky, Zarina Zabrisky, Elena Andreychykova, Andrei Krasniashikh) available in English translation. The implemented analysis allows for a deeper understanding of the effects of wartime psychological trauma on the lives of an individual. Due to a more distant time perspective, the protagonists of Burundian texts reveal both the tragedy of the interethnic civil war conflict and the importance of addressing the causes of the conflict to prevent its replication in the future. In the Ukrainian texts, the initial stage of psychological trauma obtaining can be observed, which accounts for a range of the related emotional states among the characters who do not fully realize yet the traumatization process they have been going through during the first days and weeks of the russian military invasion. The narrative structure of the Burundian and Ukrainian texts was also highlighted, which helped identify traces of oral story-telling tradition (African texts) and broad allusions to the historical and cultural phenomena (Ukrainian texts).
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Avelar, Idelber Vasconcelos. "A literatura afro-americana sob a ótica da tradução." Estudos Germânicos 10, no. 1 (December 31, 1989): 36. http://dx.doi.org/10.17851/0101-837x.10.1.36-39.
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The article makes use of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minor literature - i.e. that which is produced by a minority within a major language - to shed light on the displacements imposed by Afro-American writers upon the symbolic tradition they inherit through the English language. By means of an analysis of a short story by Katherine Porter and a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, emphasis is placed on the recurrent process of demetaphorization one finds in African-American texts. Such Processes are shown to entail a theory of translation that highlights difference and contests the authority of the original. O artigo utiliza, a partir de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari, o conceito de literatura menor – literatura produzida por uma minoria no interior de uma língua majoritária - para analisar os deslocamentos operados pelos escritores negros americanos na tradição simbólica herdada por eles através da língua inglesa. Por meio de uma leitura de um conto de Katherine Porter e um poema de Paul Laurence Dunbar, enfatiza-se os recorrentes processos de desmetaforização encontrados nos textos afro-americanos. Num momento seguinte, mostra-se que tais processos implicam uma teoria da tradução que privilegia a diferença e contesta a autoridade do original.
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Pratt, Paula. "Dancing with Myriam: Creating and Staging a New Metaphor for the Process of Translation." TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (June 15, 2015): 71. http://dx.doi.org/10.21992/t9q62m.
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This article tells the story, and analyzes the development, of a “staged metaphor” for the translation process, from its chance inception over ten years ago, to the more recent revision and staging of the script. In 2005, I was teaching world literature at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, while also researching the writing of Irish and North African women. I chose to focus on those women writing in Irish, Tachelhit, Arabic, or French, whose work had been translated into English. I was initially inspired by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s poem, “The Language Issue,” which compares the "sending forth" of her writing to a potential reader, to the story of Moses being discovered by Pharoah’s daughter. My ultimate goal was to produce a chamber theatre play, based on the Irish and North African texts, which would dramatize a metaphor for the translation process. This was an outgrowth of my doctoral work, in which I had drawn on oral interpretation theorists, who see the performance of literary texts as an accepted means of doing literary criticism. Accordingly, I also expanded the project to include the observations of translation theorists, and I incorporated these into the creation of the script for a chamber theatre performance. After directing a staging of the script in Morocco in 2007, I realized that I needed to add more choreographed movement, and to incorporate the character of Moses’s and Myriam’s mother into the metaphor. The addition of dance, and the foregrounding of the relationship between Myriam and her mother, draws unapologetically on female relationships. It is my conclusion that the revised metaphor, with the addition of these elements, is validated by Yves Bonnefoy’s and Henri Meschonnic's depictions of “translation as relationship with an author,” and that, the metaphor does indeed “provide . . . fresh insights.”
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Deese, Adrian M. "Vernacular historiography and self-translation in early colonial Nigeria: Ajiṣafẹ's History of Abẹokuta." Africa 91, no. 5 (November 2021): 768–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0001972021000577.
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AbstractEmmanuel Olympus Moore (aka Ajiṣafẹ) (c.1875/79–1940) was a pioneer of Nigerian Yorùbá literature and popular music. Ajiṣafẹ was one of the most significant Nigerian popular cultural figures of his generation. Written during the amalgamation of Nigeria, his History of Abẹokuta (1916) (Iwe Itan Abẹokuta, 1924) is a seminal text for our understanding of Abẹokuta and the Ẹgba kingdom. This article examines the bilingual passages of the History in which Ajiṣafẹ invokes oral history to construct a religious ethnography of the early Ẹgba polity. Self-translation enabled vernacular authors to mediate constituencies. The English and Yorùbá texts of the History differ in their engagement with Yorùbá cosmology. Ajiṣafẹ's texts converge in his defence of the Odùduwà dynasty; Abẹokuta, in a constitutional Yorùbá united kingdom, would be the seat of ecclesiastical power. Civil authority in Nigeria could be stabilized through an Abrahamic renegotiation of divine kingship. To establish his treatise within a genealogy of world Christianity, Ajiṣafẹ utilized self-translation as a rhetorical device to reconcile the working of providence in precolonial and colonial African history. Ajiṣafẹ's History, ultimately, is an Abrahamic exposition of the role of God's providence in bringing about the complete unification of Nigeria in September 1914.
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Ichim-Radu, Mihaela Nicoleta. "Vasile Alecsandri: Unique Aspects of the Biographical Itinerary vs. Recovery of the Writer's Memory." Intertext, no. 1/2 (57/58) (October 2021): 76–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.54481/intertext.2021.1.08.
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Among the writers of his generation, Alecsandri is the most comprehensive one, expressing not only the patriotic aspirations and desires, but also the discoveries from the universe of the private life and trying to make himself noticed in almost all the main literary genres and species. By different circumstances, Alecsandri gets to travel through Moldavia, Wallachia, Bucovina and Transylvania, to the European part of Turkey, to Italy, Austria, Germany, France, Spain, Great Britain, North of Africa, either for personal pleasure, to accompany Elena Negri, who was trying to find a more favourable climate for her fragile health, or for official business. All these travels and each of them separately are part of the development of his creation, leaving marks in his fiction and poetry and “it is printed on the screen of the human experience which defines his public and private personality”. In one of these travels, Alecsandri will discover the folk poetry, discovery which will profoundly mark his destiny as a writer and it will also have immeasurable consequences on the entire development of the Romanian literature from the last century, but also from the years to follow. As a result of the translations into French, German and English of the folk poems or of some of his original poems, Alecsandri becomes one of our first modern writers who became famous also abroad, being accessible to the foreign world.
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van den Bersselaar, Dmitri. "Creating ‘Union Ibo’: Missionaries and the Igbo language." Africa 67, no. 2 (April 1997): 273–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1161445.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractThe literature of ethnicity in Africa indicates a major role for Christian missionaries in the creation of languages in Africa. It has been argued that certain African ethnic groups owe their existence to the ‘invention’ of their language by missionaries who created a written dialect—based on one or more vernacular(s)—into which they translated the Bible. This language came to be used for education in mission schools and later also in government schools. The Bible dialect consequently became the accepted standard language of the ethnic group and acquired the function of one of the group's prime identity markers.In the case of the Igbo language, the history of the CMS missionaries' efforts at creating a written standard Igbo shows that the process was not always straightforward. The article describes the problematic process of creating a written language. The missionaries undertook continual attempts on the basis of several dialects, but it was half a century before they produced the first translation of the Bible. They complicated matters by working in different dialects, but eventually created a standard dialect which they named Union Ibo, a mixture based on several Igbo dialects.The missionaries were also confronted with resistance from at least part of the Igbo population, who contested their choice of dialect. However, it appears that the majority of the Igbo were simply not interested. The Igbo population were far more interested in education in English, and although the CMS missionaries forced some vernacular education upon the people, actual interest remained limited. It is thus not surprising that the Bible language did not become the accepted standard language of the Igbo ethnic group. The spoken Igbo language does nevertheless function as one of the prime identity markers of the group. The article argues that the importance of the Igbo language to Igbo identity is partly the result of the missionary activity.
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Murray, Jeffrey. "Homer the South African." English Today 29, no. 1 (February 27, 2013): 58–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266078412000521.
Full textAbstract:
When reviewing a much-translated canonical text such as Homer's Iliad, it has become something of a topos to question the need for yet another translation of it. In the twenty-first century alone, Homer's Iliad has benefited from at least six published English translations already: Rodney Merrill (2007), Herbert Jordan (2008), Anthony Verity (2011), Stephen Mitchell (2011), Edward McCrorie (2012) and James Muirden (2012). Richard Whitaker adds his translation to the list with a slight variation on the standard Anglo-American English translations already available, presenting his readers instead with a ‘Southern African English’ version. With such a variety of Standard English prose and poetic translations already on offer, is there really a need for yet another Iliad? Will the novelty of its subtitle, as a ‘Southern African English’ Iliad, justify its publication, and what will prevent it from being judged merely as a postcolonial curiosity?
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Todorović, Milan D., and Jelena M. Pavlović Jovanović. "TRANSFORMATION OF THE LITERARY HEROINE CELIE FROM A VICTIM TO A SELF-AWARE INDIVIDUAL IN THE NOVEL THE COLOR PURPLE." Филолог – часопис за језик књижевност и културу 14, no. 27 (June 30, 2023): 445–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.21618/fil2327445t.
Full textAbstract:
In this paper we focused on the transformation of the main character in the novel The Color Purple, Celie, through the letters she writes to God and her sister Nettie. We contrastively analysed the original text and its Serbian translation. In this paper we followed Celie’s path from an insecure and molested girl, to a confident and emancipated individual which can be observed in the development of her language and writing style. There are three types of letters within the novel: (a) letters written to God; (b) letters which introduce her transformation; (c) letters written to Celie’s sister Nettie. The insecurity of the protagonist is mirrored in her language which is a stylised version of African American English. The Serbian translation employed linguistic features that don’t belong to any particular dialect, but rather represent an approximation of the way undereducated people would speak. The beginning of the novel is characterised by short sentences, repetitive lexicon and the use of the prolonged underscore ______. In the second half of the novel the sentences become longer and the vocabulary richer. Going through the transformation from a victim of dire circumstances to a self-aware individual that accepts herself and her language, Celie represents a character of the Afro-American woman in specific historical circumstances. In addition to Celie, the transformation can be seen in other side characters, especially on the level of onomastics.