K problematiki prevajanja afriškega evrofonskega romana v slovenščino
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| Title | K problematiki prevajanja afriškega evrofonskega romana v slovenščino |
| Authors | |
| Abstract | This article opens with a brief consideration of the implications of Europhone writing in Africa: writing in a second, ex-colonial and still dominant language, and divergence between the language of writing and the (often plural) linguistic reality of the society addressed by the text. Such writing implies complex mediation between the source context and the language of the original, a grappling with language practices, representations, and norms in symbolic and political power relations, meaning that the language strategies of the text have an unavoidable political charge. The same is true of translation choices. The first part of the article analyzes some of the more radical textual strategies adopted by various African Europhone writers using a Bakhtinian approach, focusing on questions of language appropriation and literary representation of linguistic practices and, specifically, of social heteroglossia and its social and political implications in the postcolonial literary text in a European language. These strategies range from pidginization of the text (Ken Saro-Wiwa) to embedding untranslated material from indigenous languages (Amadou Hampâté Bâ) to syntactic and other transformations in which the language of writing is reorganized according to the patterns of an indigenous language, resulting in an already-translated original (Gabriel Okara, Ahmadou Kourouma). The second part explores possible translation strategies in the light of this analysis, taking into account the position of Slovenian in relation to relevant ex-colonial and African languages. Depending on the situation, these strategies can include constructing a new virtual register for the target language (in order to represent the original image of a pidgin language), transforming target-language patterns to represent the transformations at work in an already-translated original, and adapting the transliteration of embedded untranslated material. The discussion is partly based on some translations into Slovenian that already exist. The author argues for a translation approach based on consideration of the specific cultural and political location of each text as well as of the relative position of the source and target contexts and languages. Rather than a fluid, transparent translation that tends towards complicity in ethnocentric-masking-as-universal, the result of such strategies is a text that is explicitly a translation. Mediating between plural, shifting, and hybrid cultural locations, it reasserts the other’s “right to opacity” and demands active participation on the part of the reader as well as the translator. In this way, what is provisionally termed “postcolonial translation” accomplishes its own, double-voiced artistic, ethical, cultural, and political project. |
| Publisher | Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakulte / Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts |
| Date | 1970-01-01 |
| Source | Ars & Humanitas: Revija za umetnost in humanistiko Vol 3, No 1-2 (2009) |
| Rights | @ Univerza v Ljubljani, Filozofska fakulteta |