Subject
7 articles
Chinua Achebe described his English as ‘a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings’. This review reads that claim as an ethics of translation and traces its influence on later Nigerian writers and on translation studies.
Shop signs, billboards and posters make language visible in the city. This study photographs and analyses 1,200 signs in three districts of Enugu to map the use of English, Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin and other languages. English dominates official and commercial signs, but Igbo and Pidgin appear in playful and intimate registers, particularly in names and slogans. The article argues that the linguistic landscape shows a division of labour between languages rather than simple English dominance.
A review of a lucid study of African writers who publish in two languages, with chapters on self-translation and on the economics of publishing in African languages.
A review of a collection of essays by working translators on the homes, real and imagined, that translation builds between languages.
A review of a study of the multilingual talk of West African markets, which combines fieldwork in Onitsha, Kano and Accra with an accessible account of how traders build trust across languages.
Akwete cloth, woven by women in south-eastern Nigeria, recurs in modern Igbo poetry as an image of memory, labour and continuity. This review traces the motif through the work of several poets writing in Igbo and English since the 1970s, reading the loom as a figure for composition itself. It argues that the weaving metaphor allows poets to claim a feminine, communal model of authorship against the solitary genius of the Romantic tradition.
Proverbs are among the hardest items to translate, because their force depends on shared cultural knowledge. Using a corpus of 120 Igbo proverbs and their published English translations, this study classifies the strategies translators use, from literal rendering to substitution with an English proverb. Literal translation preserves imagery but often loses the proverb’s pragmatic point, while substitution keeps the point and sacrifices the culture. The article proposes a combined strategy of literal rendering with a brief gloss, and tests it with student readers.