Culture and Stylistics in Translation: The Case of the Book of Proverbs in the Mfantse Bible
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Date
2020-02-12
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Abstract
This study investigates how the Mfantse Bible translation communicates the intended message to its users. It examines how the strategies and techniques adopted in an English-Mfantse rendition communicate to achieve naturalness and faithfulness. The book, Early Scriptures of the Gold Coast discusses the inconsistencies in the Mfantse Bible and reports that even though effort was invested into the translation by missionaries and native speakers of Mfantse, the Bible lacked some finesse. This study explores the holistic translation of the Mfantse Bible. It is a qualitative study which contributes to research on Bible Translation and translation pedagogy. Generally, poetry translation is challenging, therefore the Book of Proverbs was selected as a case study. After a careful reading of the Book of Proverbs in both the source and target languages, inventory of all grammatical expressions, figurative expressions and cultural notions were taken. These were coded and analysed and later crosschecked with users in focus group discussions to ascertain their naturalness. At the grammatical level, the study establishes that both English and Akan have particular grammatical structures that express the intended meaning of the scripture without distorting meaning. In the grammatical analysis, some errors exist but their effect on meaning is minimal because morphemes are functional and have no content or conceptual meaning. The strategy most commonly employed is equivalence, in addition to a few instances of deletion. Cultural substitution worked best for the translation of culture specific items. In the Mfantse Bible, most repetition types are lost due to vocabulary and structural changes. Also, wrong cultural substitution led to mistranslations, possibly due to difference in ecology. Some errors emerged due to the fact that the verbs used did not collocate with the appropriate nouns they agree with. In the translation of figurative expressions, cultural substitution was used but the preferred strategy was literal translation. The figurative expressions used most are synonymy and antithetic parallelism. Once more, literalism helped to maintain the expressions so that they are presented to the reader as in the source text. Finally, codemixing has been discovered as one of the strategies employed in the translation. According to most of the language consultants, the translation sounds natural to a high extent and any average speaker should be able to read correctly and understand the Bible at least on a second attempt. Theoretically, the study has advanced Baker’s Levels of Equivalence in terms of contribution and proves that the levels are independent of one another and that at every level a unique outcome can be achieved.
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Seminar
Keywords
Cultural substitution, Translation, missionaries, cultural notions