Scholarly works
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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 Translating Igbo Gods into German, cultural distance and intercultural postcolonial communication(2024) Eke, J. N.A culture’s gods provide insight into its cultural epistemologies, worldviews, establish its cosmologies and connection to the divine will, and detail the beliefs and values that form the basses of behavior, unity, and collective action of its people. The translation of gods is thus more than the exchange of information but also the representation of a people making it, therefore, the space for the contact, conflict and negotiation of cultural knowledge, values and beliefs, and differences, and for determining the international cultural standing of cultures. This study examined the translation into German of purposively selected Igbo god’s and divinities in Chinua Achebe’s classics Things Fall Apart (TFA) and Arrow of God (AOG) within the context of intercultural postcolonial textual communication/relations. Lawrence Venuti’s Domestication and Foreignisation translation approaches serve as framework while critical intercultural and translation analysis was descriptively applied to data.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 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