Scholarly works in European Studies
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Item Culture, meaning and language in intercultural political-postcolonial translation communication(2022) Eke, J. N.This study contextualises translation as intercultural political textual communication and relations within the Postcolony. The Postcolony is a politically active space in which ex-coloniser and ex-colonised cultures negotiate their differentiated meanings, identities and humanities in asymmetrical relations using various communicative media including textual, oral and symbolic. Translation is both textual and symbolic communication mediated through translator-manipulable language and embossed with the potency of cultural knowledge, meaning, and identity representations, and of creating understanding or exacerbating conflict. Designed on qualitative and interpretive research and deploying postcolonial translation theory to account for inequality and contestation of knowledge and meanings in textual cultural encounters and to interrogate neocolonial forms of representation, this study heuristically reviewed the bondedness of culture, meaning and language. It further explored with illustrations from purposively selected translation text units the underlayered texture of a dialogic discourse in a postcolonial translation communication that insists on retaining and legitimizing in the target text remnants of the negative ‘otherness’ inscribed on African cultures in primordial European narratives on and attitudes towards Africa(ns). The study concluded on the critical positioning of the translator to mediate unbiased textual representation of cultural realities and identities in international cultural political communication and thus contribute to intercultural understanding and, perhaps, to intercultural cooperation.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 Representation of African cultural knowledge and identity in versions of German-translated things fall apart by Chinua Achebe—a critical intercultural communication analysis(2022) Eke, J. N.The translation of Things Fall Apart (TFA) into German has elicited interest in language interaction and especially in German-African textual intercultural communication within broader Euro-African cultural and postcolonial relations. The publication of a third German translation of TFA, Alles Zerfällt, in 2012 by Uda Strätling promises an alternative reading and possibly a truer representation of African cultural knowledge and identity compared to the two previous translations. Drawing on I.A. Richards’ theory of meaning, skopos theory, and postcolonial theory, this study examines, through a critical intercultural analysis of purposively selected cultural text units, the transfer of African cultural knowledge from the source text to the target texts in order to elucidate how African cultural identity is represented to the target readership. The study shows that while Strätling’s version appears to more adequately represent source text cultural knowledge and identity, it nevertheless still manages to perpetuate the exoticization of African culture as archaic, primitive, and inferior.Item Translating health and healing in things fall apart (TFA) and arrow of God (AOG) into German: an intercultural communication appraisal(2021-11) Eke, J. N.The knowledge about a people that engenders attitudes and responses towards them come mostly from knowing diverse aspects of their culture. This knowledge can be accessed through various textual media including translated literary texts. The world of diseases, ill-health and healing of a people, the Igbo in this instance, mirrors aspects of the cultural landscape of world-views, values and belief systems that not only determine the attitudes and relationships within the culture regarding well-being but also shape how the people may be perceived as an African cultural identity. Differences and distance between cultures, asymmetry in cultural attitudes and relations plus the cultural competence of the translator would affect adequacy in the transfer of meanings of health contexts, terms and concepts in translation and thus determine the quality of representation of a people. Employing intercultural textual and translation analysis and illustrating with purposively selected translated text units from the German translations of Chinua Achebe’s novels Things Fall Apart (TFA) and Arrow of God (AOG), this paper concludes, following observed misrepresentations of the source culture, with emphasis on sufficient knowledge of the interrelating source and target cultures and a thorough understanding of particular contexts of cultural meanings as translator base knowledge that will facilitate adequate transfer of meanings and make intercultural understanding and representation feasible through translation.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.