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 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.