The IATISContinuum Translation Studies Series

Translation Studies in Africa

Edited by Judith Inggs and Libby Meintjes

IATIS Yearbook 2008

Judith Inggs and Libby Meintjes (eds) (2009) Translation Studies in Africa. London/New York: Continuum.

ISBN (hardback): 978-1-8470-6177-5

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-8471-4589-5

Africa is a huge continent with multicultural nations, where translation and interpretation are everyday occurrences. Translation studies has flourished in Africa in the last decade, with countries often having several official languages.

The primary objective of this volume is to bring together research articles on translation and interpreting studies in Africa, written mainly, but not exclusively, by researchers living and working in the region. The focus is on the translation of literature and the media, and on the uses of interpreting. It provides a clear idea of the state and direction of research, and highlights research that is not commonly disseminated in North Africa and Europe. This book is an essential text for students and researchers working in translation studies, African studies and in African linguistics.

Reviews

"Translation has always been the lifeblood of the African continent, from the earliest pre-colonial times, during the colonial scramble for Africa as well as in the modern globalised context, but there has to date been little access to African research in translation studies for researchers. This book responds admirably to the challenge, presenting various perspectives on this rapidly developing discipline, including the importance of translation in shaping African history and culture, an examination of the personal and the self-conscious in the praxis of translation, as well as topics such as the translation of children’s literature, educational interpreting at multilingual universities and the challenges of training translators in post-apartheid South Africa. This is a book which raises strong awareness of issues, as well as making us all aware that there is so much more that remains unexplored."

 

Dr Kim Wallmach, Department of Linguistics, University of South Africa.

Those wishing to respond to any of the articles included in this volume are invited to send their contributions to the Chair of the Publications Committee.

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< Frontmatter

< Contents

< Contributors

< Introduction

Judith INGGS  and Libby MEINTJES (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)

1. Translation Matters: Linguistic and Cultural Representation

Paul BANDIA (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada)

This paper provides a contextual frame from which to examine translation processes on the continent. Bandia examines the importance of translation in shaping African history and culture, extending the notion of translation beyond the mere transfer from one language to another to include contemporary understandings of transnational and transcultural encounters in the global context. The chapter traces translation activity on the continent and the representation of Africanness from pre-colonial to post-colonial times. In his discussion of literature in West and East Africa, Bandia considers how the notion of colonial subjects as ‘translated beings’ and African oral tradition have informed African writing and expression. Writing orality, he says, ‘paradoxically imposes a state of bilingualism’ marking African writing as different and making it possible to subvert and challenge dominant literary hegemonies. The translation and representation of Africanness through the writing of orality becomes a movement from a ‘relatively homogeneous oral culture to a more heterogeneous or hybrid global culture’. He concludes that the relationship of African writers to language is one of translation, and the assertion of identity through linguistic difference challenges rather than submits to the ‘unsavoury legacies of colonialism’ while constituting an important aspect of the creative hybridity of African writing.

2. Cracking the Code: Translation as Transgression in Triomf

Leon de KOCK (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)

Leon de Kock’s contribution engages with the creative hybridity of African writing on two levels. First he considers the theoretical implications of the literary translation project in Africa, and South Africa more specifically, and then relates this to his own experience as a working translator. He uses his translation of Marlene van Niekerk’s award-winning Afrikaans novel Triomf (1994) as a case study to corroborate the first part of his discussion. He argues convincingly that the nature of South African literature as a site of both convergence and divergence complicates the task of literary translation. This task becomes a dangerous balancing act which is compounded by the translator’s attempt to approximate ‘a higher ideal of expression’ (Walter Benjamin’s elusive ‘pure language’) and is made more difficult by the ‘experiential and conceptual recasting of modes of being across languages’. This task is further complicated by the irreducible nature of individual literary expression and the complexity of the South African literary context which is one of relentless heterogeneity and hybridity, characterized by tension, and which De Kock describes as ‘a rich textual seam’, marking it as enduringly different and forcing the translation project towards the very brink of untranslatability.

3. Translational Intertexts in A Change of Tongue: Preliminary Thoughts

Frances VOSLOO (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa)

The contribution by Frances Vosloo approaches the South African literary translator from the perspective of Antje Krog’s A Change of Tongue (2003). In this work, Krog, a well-known South African poet, writer and translator, presents her reader with her discourse on translation through five intertexts, all of which relate directly or indirectly to the concept of translation. These intertexts serve as possible spaces of interpretation and allusion in which the reader is able to engage with Krog as writer and more specifically as translator. Vosloo argues that multiple readings of these intertextual references provide a way of accessing Krog’s own theoretical assumptions on, and conceptualization of, translation, and this means that she has to consider the issue of whether the intertext does indeed serve the function and purpose an explicit intertext is generally believed to serve. Through a rich reading of one of these intertexts, Vosloo concludes that the intertexts function not only to signpost Krog’s discourse on translation and her own ideas on change and the transformation/merging of the individual, but to provide a frame for ‘translating’/ mediating Krog’s own voice.

4. How Translation Feels

Libby MEINTJES (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)

This paper examines the responses of a number of South African writers to the translation project and the translation partnership. It seeks to tease out the other subject positions involved in the translation partnership. Meintjes draws on e-mail conversations with South African authors, public debates and other fora to narrate the emotional traces left behind by translation. She does this through the eyes of the writer and the translator. Asking open-ended questions of her respondents she affords the writers and translators space to be reflexive and thus builds a co-constructed account of their views on being translated. Roland Barthes’s (1974) notion of readerly and writerly texts, and his categories of texte de désir, texte de plaisir and texte de jouissance are used to understand the differing responses and attitudes of various authors which, she concludes, can be ascribed to their different understandings of the nature of their texts and to the emergence of different loyalties in the translation process.

5. Problems and Prospects of Translating Yorùbá Verbal Art Into Literary English: An Ethnolinguistic Approach

Tajudeen SURAKAT (Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria)

Tajudeen Surakat examines the translatability of elements of Yoruba verbal art, or oral culture, into a predominantly literary, written language such as English. His contribution focuses on the translation of a section of verse from a prose narrative by Olu Owalabi which is set during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70. The work includes a number of incantations, praise poems and proverbs, all of which pose specific problems for the translator. Surakat discusses the various strategies available to the translator and the cultural difficulties involved, and ultimately suggests ways in which the loss of meaning can be minimized. Surakat provides an overview of Yoruba verbal art forms, which are commonly used by elders, orators and priests to embellish and adorn their speech. In his analysis he takes a broadly ethnolinguistic approach, drawing on systemic functional linguistics, linguistically-oriented translation theorists such as Newmark and Nida, and on more recent concepts such as Appiah’s thick translation and Venuti’s discussions of foreignization and domestication, visibility and invisibility. Surakat suggests two possible translations for each line of verse, broadly based on either a semantic or communicative approach. He concludes that of the two main art forms discussed here, praise poems and incantations; praise poems are ‘easier’ to deal with, largely because of the elements of religious culture involved in incantations. This chapter opens up a number of possibilities for future research on the translation of verbal art or orature, not only from Yoruba to English but also from languages in other regions of Africa.

6. Translating the Third Culture: The Translation of Aspects of Senegalese Culture in Selected Literary Works by Ousmane Sembène

Charmaine YOUNG (University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa)

This chapter again focuses on the translation of a particular form of language, rooted in a specific culture and influenced by the mother tongue of the writer. Charmaine Young analyses translations of works by the Senagalese writer, Ousmane Sembène. Sembène is a native Wolof and Bambara speaker but chooses to write in French. He writes according to the linguistic and literary norms ‘imposed’ upon him by the French colonial authority, but he also appropriates this by representing the symbols, practices, idiosyncrasies and cultural uniqueness of his own society through particular stylistic and linguistic choices. This results in the emergence of a ‘third culture’ in the French text. Young believes that through a compromise between the techniques of domestication and foreignization the translation of post-colonial literature and its inherent otherness can serve to resist the conventions of the colonial encounter. Three texts are taken as examples, Le docker noir (1956), Les bouts de bois de Dieu (1960), and Xala (1974), together with their three translations by Schwartz (1987), Price (1970) and Wake (1976) respectively. The analysis concludes that differences in the approaches of the three translators either serve to ‘release’ or obscure the third culture in translation. Her findings confirm her original hypothesis that it is only by integrating domesticating and foreignizing strategies in the same translation that the third culture can be preserved in these kinds of texts.

7. Translating, Rewriting and Retelling Traditional South African Folktales: Mediation, Imposition or Appropriation?

Judith INGGS (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)

This chapter tackles a different genre of literature, that of the translation and rewriting of South African folktales primarily aimed at children. The story of the publication of these folktales in English, starting from the 1860s through to the present day, is discussed in terms of mediation, appropriation and imposition and traces the changing attitudes of transcribers, translators, rewriters and retellers over the last 150 years. Early writers introduced fairies, pixies and elves into the hot, sunny, South African landscape, unable to let go of the supernatural beings of their own childhoods. Attitudes towards the tales and towards the peoples among whom the tales originated were ambivalent or even patronising, assuming a distance between the reader of the English retellings and the Other of the source texts. By the 1980s such attitudes had changed, at times approaching reverence for a precolonial African paradise, which framed the way in which the tales were packaged and presented. New trends indicate the attempt to pursue a project of national unity and identity. One particularly interesting trend is the writing and translating of contemporary versions of tales by black South African storytellers who continue the tradition of storytelling in their own language as well as in English. A possible approach for new translations or collections is to produce hybridized texts in which difference is synthesised into something that might further the ongoing project of national unity.

8. The Concepts of Domestication and Foreignization in the Translation of Children’s Literature in the South African Educational Context

Haidee KRUGER (North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, South Africa)

This chapter sets out some practical and theoretical considerations for studying the translation of children’s literature in the South African educational context. It provides a background to the practical uses and functions of (translated) children’s literature in this context and within South African society as a whole. In particular, it focuses on the relationships between the various discourses that constitute South African society, and the function of translation broadly (and the translation of children’s literature specifically) within this interplay of discourses. The tension between domestication and foreignization is particularly relevant. Most approaches to the translation of children’s literature propose target-text oriented strategies such as domestication, localization and cultural adaptation to make the translated text as accessible as possible to the target-language child reader and to facilitate identification. However, in the multicultural South African context, where a great deal of emphasis is placed on intercultural tolerance and understanding, foreignizing translation approaches may well have a role to play. Kruger explores this tension in relation to the translation of children’s literature and suggests that the situation in South Africa problematizes distinctions between the domestic and the foreign, producing hybridized translation strategies and requiring hybridized approaches to translation. Thus Kruger argues that domestication and foreignization are more usefully understood as divergent but complementary sets of strategies and that the constant interplay between them serves various functions.

9. Translation and Shifting Identities in Post-apartheid South Africa: Rethinking Teaching Paradigms in Times of Transition

Ileana DIMITRIU (University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa)

This chapter is concerned with another area of translation studies in an African context, that of appropriate and useful forms of training translators in multilingual countries. Ileana Dimitriu provides a fresh and insightful analysis of teaching paradigms during a period of transition, when social identities are undergoing profound shifts and identity practices can be deciphered from the ways people position themselves through language. Her research into translation and shifting identities is informed by broad post-structuralist, non-essentialist, views of identity as a multiple, mutating and flexible category, and by what is referred to as a semiotic construct that is influenced by its specific access to different identity-building resources. Where ‘first-world’ and ‘third-world’ coexist, as in a number of African countries, Dimitriu suggests that trainers need to be open to experimenting with less established forms of teaching translation. She sees translation in South Africa as playing a crucial role in civil life, and translators as central in integrating diverse communities, both culturally and linguistically. In order to equip them to do this Dimitriu proposes that the teaching and practice of translation should be viewed as a form of social, cultural and critical text-intervention. A modular approach to the teaching of translation is suggested which would provide flexibility in terms of adapting to contemporary challenges in education and the shifting identities of a society still in transition.

10. Towards Comprehending Spoken-language Educational Interpreting as Rendered at a South African University

Marlene VERHOEF and Johan BLAAUW (Institutional Language Directorate, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa)

The contribution by Marlene Verhoef and Johann Blaauw examines the characteristics of the various modes of interpreting used in teaching and learning and provides a typology of the interpreting genre as developed over the past four years by the North-West University in South Africa. Although the simultaneous mode of interpreting is used in classrooms it has become apparent that the educational interpreter’s socio-communicative function, normally associated more with community interpreting, cannot be ignored. It concludes, on the basis of their longitudinal research data, that the type of interpreting used is a role-determined type of community interpreting using the simultaneous working mode.

11. Simultaneous Interpreting: Implementing Multilingual Teaching in a South African Tertiary Classroom

Anne-Marie BEUKES and Marné PIENAAR (University of Johannesburg, South Africa)

In their contribution, Anne-Marie Beukes and Marné Pienaar report on the use of simultaneous interpreting (using whispered interpreting equipment) as an alternative to parallel-medium teaching. Simultaneous interpreting is discussed as a language policy management mechanism in the context of the changing linguistic needs of students at South African tertiary institutions, using the University of Johannesburg as a case study. Interestingly, they conclude that the use of simultaneous interpreting in the tertiary context is not always feasible or appropriate and that its implementation needs to be understood and examined in relation to the motives and objectives of rendering such a service.

< Index

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