European Studies
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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 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.