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 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 Selbsttäuschung und verlust des selbsts im streben nach selbstbestimmungund selbstbefreiung in peter bichsels ,,ein tisch ist ein tisch (Self-Deception and Loss of Self in the Pursuit of Self-Determination and Self-Liberation in Peter Bichsel's 'A Table is a Table)(2024) Eke, J. N.Das Streben des individuellen Selbst von den Zwängendes gemeinschaftlichen oder kollektiven Lebens zu befreien ist eine der bestimmenden Charakteristiken des heutigen Lebens. Dieses Streben ist auch in heutigen Sprachsystemen zu sehen. In den Wörtern müssen Selbstdarstellungen entwickelt werden. Diese Entwicklung untergräbt die gemeinschaftliche Zugehörigkeit. Mit solchem Thema beschäftigt sich Peter Bichsels in ,,Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch“ als er davondemonstriert, wie man sich im Stich lassen kannwegen der Individualisierung des Sprachsystems.In dieser Arbeit wird untersucht, wie Bichsel in seiner Shortstory„Ein Tisch ist Ein Tisch“die neue globale Gesellschaft vorhersagtund wohin sich Menschen durch Individualisierungdes Sprachsystemsführen.Durch Postmodernismus und Textanalyse-Methoden wird die Shortstory kritisiert. (The pursuit of liberating the individual self from the constraints of communal or collective life is one of the defining characteristics of modern life. This pursuit is also visible in contemporary language systems. Self-representations must be developed within words. This development undermines communal belonging. Peter Bichsel deals with such a theme in 'A Table is a Table' as he demonstrates how one can be 'left in the lurch' (or lose oneself) because of the individualization of the language system. This work examines how Bichsel predicts the new global society in his short story and where people lead themselves through the individualization of the language system. The short story is critiqued using Postmodernism and methods of text analysis)Item Cultural racism and resistance -revisiting post-reunification Germany in Pepe Danquart’s short film “Schwarzfahrer” (blackrider)(2024) Eke, J. N.The tram ride of a young Blackman in post-reunification metropolitan and multicultural Berlin is enmeshed in a cultural racist encounter that problematizes contemporary Germanforeigner/ migrant relations. Deploying cultural racism and resistance as conceptual framework, and using historical-interpretive and textual analysis, the study examines interacting sociocultural- cum-political factors and race theorization implicit in the historical contexts of Germanforeigner/ migrant relations in post-reunification Germany as portrayed in the film. The study concludes that an enduring and deeply set fear of losses of racial identity, people and country escalated the economic, social, and political problems linked to German reunification and induced racial conflict relations that pittedthe native white-German majority against a foreigner/migrant minority – relations yet to fade away in Germany today.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.