Intercultural Postcolonial Communication in the German Translations of Selected Novels of Chinua Achebe

INTERCULTURAL POSTCOLONIAL COMMUNICATION IN THE GERMAN TRANSLATIONS OF SELECTED NOVELS OF CHINUA ACHEBE BY EKE, JOSEPH NWAJIRICHUKWU Matric No. 65474 B.A. (Hons) German Studies (Ibadan), M.A. European Studies (Ibadan), M.A. Translation (German) (Ibadan) A Thesis in the Department of European Studies Submitted to the Faculty of Arts in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY of the UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY AUGUST 2011 CERTIFICATION This is to certify that this work was carried out by EKE, Joseph Nwajirichukwu in the Department of European Studies under my supervision ---------------------------- -------------------------------------------- --- Date Supervisor Professor Grace Aduke Adebayo Department of European Studies University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY ii DEDICATION Pa Matthew Ironuegbulam Eke Mama Esther Mgbokwo Eke My Parents A firm source of inspiration and courage My wife, Gift and son, Ironuegbulam Dearly Beloved UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT God has been most gracious and kind to me and has shown Himself strong in my education. He has brought me this far. This Ph.D is a testimony of His mercies. To Him be every praise and glory. I immensely appreciate my supervisor, Professor Aduke G. Adebayo without whose support and guidance this thesis would not have been possible. She undertook to supervise this thesis in the spirit of her care for the survival and progress of every section in the Department of European Studies. I am thankful to her for her thorough reading and advice on the thesis amidst the pressure of her work and, sometimes, the challenges of health. Thank you Ma. May God reward you richly and grant you grace and life more abundant. My sincere appreciation and thanks go to my colleague lecturers in the German Studies programme: Frau Maria Akinduro, Frau Sabine Adelio and Herr Lanre Okuseinde who were considerate of my need to finish this Ph.D programme. They also provided insightful and useful discussions on German culture that enriched the study. Mrs. Akinduro, my former teacher and now senior colleague, thank you for paying for my internet access in our shared office; and Mrs. Adelio, I am grateful for your kind assistance and advice that made possible the needed DAAD short-duration Graduate Fellowship in the University of Bayreuth, Germany. I also appreciate the invaluable encouragement of my former teacher, Herr (Dr.) Felix Amanor-Boadu. He voluntarily retired when I was not quite ready for his absence, but his death at the time of submitting this thesis is deeply saddening. Dr. Shaban Mayanja, former DAAD lecturer at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, who read through the draft of the thesis and provided critical comments and recommendations that immensely benefitted the study. Thank you very much. I am very grateful to Rev. Professor Louis Munoz for his advice, support and prayers. Dr. Alla Fawole, Dr. Nwando Babalobi and Dr. Akin Ademuyiwa were of great encouragement. Dr. Tunde Ayeleru and Dr. R. Sanusi thank you very much. I must mention Dr. Oha Obododimma and Professor O.C. Adesina of the Departments of EnglishUNIVERSITY and History respectively: I OFam grateful IBADAN for your in-puts LIBRARYto the success of this study and for your motivation. Thank you very much Dr. M. N. Christopher of the Department of Communication and Language Arts. I am very grateful to the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) for the graduate Fellowship it offered me, from April to July 2010, towards the improvement and completion of the thesis. I deeply thank Professor Eckhard Breitinger of the Institute of iv African Studies (IAS), University of Bayreuth, Germany, who hosted my stay at the University. Besides making my stay comfortable and memorable, he read through the draft thesis and provided very useful critical comments, materials and guidance that enriched the study. I sincerely thank Professor Susan Bassnett of the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, Warwick University, UK and Professor Kirsten Malmkjaer of the Middlesex University Translation Institute, UK for their assistance with sources. They kindly mailed to me on request respective hard copies of their relevant articles on Postcolonial Translation and Translational Stylistics. My heartfelt appreciation and thank you go to my beloved wife and son, who were such a tremendous support and source of cheerfulness. They showed understanding during the study and writing of the thesis but also a disturbing and at once motivating impatience to use the “Dr.” title. Mike would remind me also that he was not the only one that has exams, daddy too. God will continue to keep you in His favour. Finally, there are many more whose various contributions I truly appreciate but whose names I am constrained by space to omit here. To all of you I say a sincere thank you very much. ABSTRACT The translation of African postcolonial literary texts into German is part of the continuing intercultural dialogue between Africa and the West. This dialogue involves the contestation of meaning and the representation of cultural identity. Previous studies on the translation of Chinua Achebe‟s works into German mainly emphasise the linguistic and cultural difficulties of textual transfer ignoring questions of asymmetry and the contestation of cultural identity in textual relations. Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God successfully recover the coherence of an African traditional culture and contest the denigration of the African in Western narratives as accultural, primitive, barbaric and even subhuman. Given also the cultural distance between the German translations and their „english‟ source texts, the study investigates how adequately the German translations convey the cultural meanings and identity markers of the source culture. The meaning theory of intercultural communication associated with I.A. Richards‟ Context Theory of Meaning, Postcolonial literary and cultural theory of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin and the Skopos theory of Hans Vermeer and Katharina Reiß jointly served as the theoretical framework. Richards‟s theory emphasises that meaning resides in people not in words while Ashcroft et al establish asymmetry in textual relations. Vermeer and Reiß contend that the purpose of the target text determines translation strategies. Text-based descriptive and comparative analyses of randomly selected cultural units of translation were adopted in the study. The translations of Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are mostly inadequate to interculturalUNIVERSITY postcolonial communication. OF The IBADAN German translation LIBRARYs possess traces of ethnocentrism, which is compounded by the translators‟ insufficient knowledge of the source culture and faulty use of translation techniques. Errors erase identity indicators of source cultural imagery and structures of expressions, distort and misrepresent source culture beliefs and values, impose the beliefs and views of the target culture on the source culture. They further silence authorial voice, obscure or obliterate the rational capacity of v the source culture, mock the source culture through incongruous substitution of words and imagery, and lost cultural knowledge and depth of cultural meaning. The translation errors appear as counter-narratives that reveal a mode of rewriting cultural identity in postcolonial literature. The claim of the source culture to a differentiated and authentic self is both considerably conceded and simultaneously subverted or minimalised in order to consolidate the impression of inferiority of the excolonised cultural identity. Intercultural Communication foregrounds cultural inequality and conflict in textual relations such that narration as dialogue emerges as a contestation of meaning and cultural identities. Implicitly, there is the need to base the translation of African literary texts from one European language to another on postcolonial and intercultural hermeneutics. This is to ensure not only the preservation of the cultural knowledge and identity carried in the African texts, but also to forestall misrepresentation and motivate a constructive, progressive dialogue of cultures which is imperative for canon formation. Key words: German translation, Postcoloniality, Cultural knowledge, Intercultural Communication, Chinua Achebe. Word count: 475 TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Page i Certification ii Dedication iii Acknowledgement iv Abstract v Table of Contents vi UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Chapter One: Introduction. 1.1 General Background 1 1.2 Research Problem 6 1.3 Research Questions 8 1.4 Objectives of the Study 9 vi 1.5 Justification of the Study 9 1.6 Organisation of the Study 14 Chapter Two: Review of Literature 2.1 Postcolonial writing and translating; Translating Achebe into Euro-languages 15 2.2 Culture, Meaning and Language 23 2.3 Cultural Identity, Culture-Knowledge and Discursive-Narrative 30 2.4 Interculture, the „Other‟, Interculturality and Communication 36 2.5 Translation as Intercultural communication 46 2.6 The Literary Translator as an Intercultural communicator 52 2.7 Text-Types, the Literary text and the Translation of Culture 59 2.8 Equivalence, Adequacy and Translation 66 2.9 Ethnocentrism and Translation 72 2.10 Post-colonialism, Literature and Translation 74 2.11 Translating Approaches, Strategies and Techniques 84 2.12 Summary to Review of Literature 94 Chapter Three: Theoretical Framework and Methodology 3.1

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