Eine interkulturelle analyse der deutschen übersetzungen von Ngũgĩ wa Thiong‘os Roman ,,the river between“.
Abstract
The translation of African literature into various languages has played a major role in the
advancement of African languages, culture and heritage. However, a lot still needs to be done in
order to promote intercultural dialogue through literature. The translation of African written
literature (written in English or African languages) into European languages poses a unique
challenge especially to non-African translators because of the special way in which African writers
manipulate the English language and use it to express their African experiences. The presence of
culture specific items is another problem area for translators. Existing translations are not truly
adequate, hence there is need to improve these translations. As a contribution to this, the following
study focused on the analysis of two German translations: one by Karl Heinrich (1970) and the
other by Anita Jörges-Djafari (2014) of the novel The River Between written by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
(1974) with special attention given to the way in which culture specific items had been approached.
On the one hand, it intended to observe how the cultural references were translated and what
difficulties the translator encountered when transferring these cultural specificities into German. On
the other hand, this study aimed to discover, through this scientific undertaking, the meaning and
value of culture specific items from a given literary work, and to highlight the relationship between
the source text and the target text as far as the cultural references were concerned. The study also
aimed to investigate alternative translation strategies that can be applied to solve these difficulties.
This study was limited to culture specific items which are deeply embedded in the Gikuyu language
and culture. This study was conducted on the basis of two major theoretical concepts: the relevance
theory proposed by Wilson and Sperber (1995) and its application in translation by Ernst-August
Gutt (2000) and the translation strategies of culture specific items proposed by Franco Aixelá
(1996).
Publisher
University of Nairobi
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United StatesUsage Rights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/Collections
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