Scholarly works in European Studies
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Item The cultural other, interculture and interculturality in postcolonial translation dialogic-communication(0022) Eke, J. N.This article takes its point of departure from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to heuristically establish the nature of cultural otherness, interculture and interculturality in postcolonial translation communication. It posits that postcolonial translation communication takes a discursive-dialogic form that implicates the conflicts and asymmetry of cultural relations between ex-coloniser and excolonised cultures and societies. The excoloniser and excolonised are respectively on the quest for continuing dominance and self-liberation. Illustrating with text units from German translated Things Fall Apart, the paper concludes on the relevance of postcolonial translation critics to enhance positive outcomes in postcolonial textual communicative relations particularly between Africa and Europe.Item Kinship honorifics and intercultural communication in German translations of things fall apart and arrow of God(Department of Communication and Language Arts, Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, 2017) Eke, J. N.This paper examines honorifics that mirror cultural and social standings and attitudes within the kinship system of the Igbo of Africa and, thereby, provides an understanding of the cultural constitution and identity of the society. Variations in kinship systems and terms across cultures create difficulty in the transfer of cultural knowledge through translation - instanced here with Igbo and German cultures. This difficulty, therefore, demands that a translator does a close reading of cultural narrative contexts of kinship honorifics usages to avoid misrepresentation of cultures and to achieve intercultural understanding.Item Benennung und umbenennung personennamen in interkultureller kommunikation: rechtschreibfehler als umbenennung in der deutschen ubersetzung von things fall apart und arrow of God von Chinua Achebe(2015-05) Eke, J. N.Personal proper names are often treated as mere ‘defining labels’ lacking in meaning, whose translation is a smooth process of transference that requires no serious decision-making process. This assumption in many extant studies quite often leads to a less adequate attention paid to their translations and, therefore, their full importance and significance in, especially narratives, are not emphasized in the target text. Employing textual and translation analyses and illustrating with purposively selected text units from the German translations of Chinua Achebe’s novels, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, this paper argues that personal proper names are meaningful beyond being mere referents. They are not only part of the cultural universe of a source text, especially an African cultural source text, they are also an important part of the cultural plot and can bear multiple shades of meanings. Close attention must, therefore, be paid to their orthography in the transference process of translation, in order to adequately render them into the target text in intercultural narrative communication contexts.Item Cultural distance, memory and the perception of otherness: Chinua Achebe’s narratives as intercultural mediation(Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria, 2015) Eke, J. N.Cultural distance and cultural memory are two phenomena that are critical in intercultural dialogue and relations. This is because both are connected with the perception and management of difference in cultural knowledge, identity relations and representations. Intercultural relations between Europe and Africa have continued to be bogged down by the crisis of difference, asymmetry and inequality that engage the interest of African postcolonial narratives, for instance those of Chinua Achebe. This paper argues that Achebe's writing back to the empire through his narratives, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, rather than being seen only as a one-sided attack on Euro-Western chauvinism, is an act of intercultural mediation by an 'involved mediator', who engages cultural memory texts to reduce cultural distance and to call for mutual understanding and accommodation between African and European cultures.Item Postcoloniality, idiomatic allusion and intercultural communication in the translation of things fall Apart and arrow of God into German(Taylor&Francis, 2015) Eke, J. N.Item A historico-cultural trail of cultural distance in intercultural postcolonial relations: between the Igbo African and GermanEuropean Cultures(Department of European Studies, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, 2013) Eke, J. N.Cultural Distance (CD), the mean of proximity and distance resultant from cultural difference, is critical to intercultural postcolonial relations of asymmetry and textual interpretive practices like translation, media imaging of the other and the like. This is because it potentially affects interpersonal, intergroup, business and interstate relations. It can also affect the understanding of cultural text units, images and contexts, as well as attitude to and reception of the otherness of the culturally different. Whereas CD has been measured by variables subjected to mathematical calculations, this paper used the spatial and temporal convergence and divergence between the Igbo African and the German European cultures as a subset ol that between Europe and Africa in general. Adopting a historical comparative and textual analyses of data, it suggests a view oi CD in an intercultural postcolonial context between Europeans and Africans in the relations of Europeans to their traditional pasts and to the African traditional cultural other.Item Postcoloniality, proverbs and intercultural dialogue: translating African postcolonial texts, things fall apart and arrow of god, into German(Department of Linguistics and African Languages, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria, 2013) Eke, J. N.The proverb is not only an oral form that enhances immediate communication and mends social conflict, especially in traditional societies, it is also a vista to the knowledge and understanding of the cultural other at the various levels of content and context of the proverb. This latter function makes the use of proverbs in African postcolonial literary texts particularly meaningful and significant in the relations of asymmetry that characterises ex-coloniser and ex- colonised societies in textual cultural relations mediated through translation. The cultural knowledge and cultural identity markers borne in proverbs can, however, be contested, distorted or affirmed in translations: thus making proverb translation a unique space of cultural identity and meaning contest. Illustrating with proverbs purposively selected from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God and their German translations, this article demonstrates the ‘embeddedness’ of proverbs in the conflictual dialogue and discourse of postcolonial textual relations and identity ascription. It emphasises the need that the approaches and strategies for their translation take cognisance of this dialogic discourse and of the authorial communicative purpose of the texts.Item Intercultural Postcolonial Communication in the German Translations of Selected Novels of Chinua achebe(2011) Eke, J. N.The translation of African postcolonial literary texts into German is part of the continuing intercultural dialogue between Africa and the West. This dialogue involves the contestation of meaning and the representation of cultural identity. Previous studies on the translation of Chinua Achebe‟s works into German mainly emphasise the linguistic and cultural difficulties of textual transfer ignoring questions of asymmetry and the contestation of cultural identity in textual relations. Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God successfully recover the coherence of an African traditional culture and contest the denigration of the African in Western narratives as accultural, primitive, barbaric and even subhuman. Given also the cultural distance between the German translations and their „english‟ source texts, the study investigates how adequately the German translations convey the cultural meanings and identity markers of the source culture. The meaning theory of intercultural communication associated with I.A. Richards‟ Context Theory of Meaning, Postcolonial literary and cultural theory of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin and the Skopos theory of Hans Vermeer and Katharina Reiß jointly served as the theoretical framework. Richards‟s theory emphasises that meaning resides in people not in words while Ashcroft et al establish asymmetry in textual relations. Vermeer and Reiß contend that the purpose of the target text determines translation strategies. Text-based descriptive and comparative analyses of randomly selected cultural units of translation were adopted in the study.The translations of Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are mostly inadequate to intercultural postcolonial communication. The German translations possess traces of ethnocentrism, which is compounded by the translators‟ insufficient knowledge of the source culture and faulty use of translation techniques. Errors erase identity indicators of source cultural imagery and structures of expressions, distort and misrepresent source culture beliefs and values, impose the beliefs and views of the target culture on the source culture. They further silence authorial voice, obscure or obliterate the rational capacity of the source culture, mock the source culture through incongruous substitution of words and imagery, and lost cultural knowledge and depth of cultural meaning. The translation errors appear as counter-narratives that reveal a mode of rewriting cultural identity in postcolonial literature. The claim of the source culture to a differentiated and authentic self is both considerably conceded and simultaneously subverted or minimalised in order to consolidate the impression of inferiority of the excolonised cultural identity. Intercultural Communication foregrounds cultural inequality and conflict in textual relations such that narration as dialogue emerges as a contestation of meaning and cultural identities. Implicitly, there is the need to base the translation of African literary texts from one European language to another on postcolonial and intercultural hermeneutics. This is to ensure not only the preservation of the cultural knowledge and identity carried in the African texts, but also to forestall misrepresentation and motivate a constructive, progressive dialogue of cultures which is imperative for canon formation