Transliteration in the translation of Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom

Abstract

Translating from a developed language like English into an African language may be daunting. This is because African languages like isiNdebele and isiZulu may lack some standardised terminologies for specific terms of the developed source language. When African language translators face complicated terms from a source language that do not have appropriate equivalents, they resort to transliteration as a term-creation strategy. This paper aims to compare the extent to which translators of both Ikhambo Elide Eliya Ekululekweni (isiNdebele) and Uhambo Olude Oluya Enkululekweni (isiZulu) have used transliteration as a term-creation strategy, and the impact this strategy had in enabling the readers of the isiNdebele and isiZulu version of Nelson Mandela's biography to access the source text easily. This paper is, therefore, qualitative and comparative. The researcher will describe transliteration used in both the isiZulu and isiNdebele versions. A corpus-based method of collecting data (from both translated biographies) was used. A theory of dynamic or functional equivalence formed the principle against which both translations were viewed. The findings are that transliteration in both languages, isiZulu and isiNdebele, has been overly used even in cases where coined known terms exist in these target languages.

Keywords

• theory of dynamic equivalence
• translation
• transliteration
• source language
• target language