Harmonizing Africa’s linguistic symphony: navigating the complexities of translating African literature using a postcolonial theory

Abstract

Whereas translation, as a theoretical and professional discipline, has fairly been scrutinized in the African context and elsewhere in the world, it cannot be downplayed that it continues to suffer a great deal of challenges. Many of these challenges could be pinned on postcolonial and post-apartheid dynamics, which prioritize political agendas over the development of this discipline in the African context. Given this reality, this article problematizes and navigates four pertinent challenges pertaining to the translation of African literature, predominantly from European (or European-Africanized) to indigenous African languages. These four challenges, which are named in the second section of this article, are recognized as principal sources of data to provide empirical evidence and are elicited from different African literary discourses. The objective is to underline that the translation challenges concerning African literature, in large part, are intensified by the vestigial elements of colonialism and apartheid in Africa. Owing to this concern, this article applies postcolonial theory to its discussions. Above all, it is important to note that I use the prefix ‘post-’ from postcolonial theory to imply that although many African states officially ceased colonialism and apartheid, it does not denote that colonialism and apartheid are completely dead. For these reasons, the general findings and discussions confirm that translators continually struggle to strike a balance between linguistic transference and retaining the ethnological, spiritual, and historical tenets in African literature. The closing remarks underline the necessity to continue this discourse in a bid to find reasonable solutions to this conundrum.

Keywords

• African literature
• apartheid
• colonialism
• postcolonial theory
• translation
• Postcolonialism