We
in Europe are woefully ignorant about the vast continent that is sub-Saharan Africa.
It was with some surprise that I learnt last week that there is a town in
Nigeria called Ilorin with a flourishing university; and I was even more
surprised to find out that it has an Institute of Translation Arts. The
institute is an offshoot of the Department of French, which is understandable
if we consider that several countries in West Africa use French as an official
language. There’s no other Nigerian translator training institution in my
extensive data base of schools and programmes although a Nigerian Association
of Translation Studies was formed recently.
The
trail through the highways and byways of Google that led me to make the
discovery is a personal one.
In
the early 1970s, inspired by Eugene Nida’s classic work Toward a Science of
Translation, I coined the term
translatology in English. (Its Romance language cognates like French traductologie have a different origin.) The story is told in an article on my academia.edu
page (see below). It didn’t catch on. Instead it was eclipsed by another term with
roughly the same meaning, translation studies, established by James Holmes. The
current figures of hits on Google are very telling: 131,000 for translatology, 2.77
million for translation studies.
So I was delighted to find that the term translatology
is used by a distinguished professor and currently head of the department of French
at Ilorin, Isaiah Bariki (see photo).. His interests are not only French but also
translating African Languages. In a paper this year he noted that translations
by the country’s institutions should not be focused on European languages only. He is the first holder of a PhD inTranslation in the University of
Ilorin The university’s web site
describes him as “an expert in translatology.”.
He has a remarkable life
story that began in a poor family in the riverine parts of the Niger Delta and presented
very challenging and unfavourable conditions for intellectual pursuits. You can
read more about it in the Adewumi article referenced below. “With French as my
base," he says, "I had a smooth sail to the shores of Translation as a field of study.”
To clarify between
Translation and Translatology, Prof. Bariki explains that “translation in its
primary sense means the transfer of a message from one language into another.
It is an applied Translatology and does not fully take care of all that
Translatology stands for. Translatology is an academic interdiscipline rooted
in a systematic study of translation, interpretation and localization, while
consciously drawing his strength from aspects of linguistics, culturology,
philology, neuroscience, history, comparative literature, philosophy,
semiology, mathematics, computer science, and a host of other fields – all in a
bid to give translation the support it needs.”
It couldn’t be better said.
Sources
Eugene Nida. Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: Brill, 1964.
Brian Harris. 'Origins and conceptual
analysis of the term Traductologie'. Paper to the Annual Conference of the
Canadian Association of Translation Studies, 2009. Published Babel 57:1.15-31, 2011.
Ilorin. Wikipedia, 2021.
Isaiah Bariki. Translating African names in fiction. iIkala 14(23):43-61, 2009.
Agency Report. ‘Things
fall Apart’ should be translated into Hausa, other languages – Don. Daily Nigerian, 30 July 2021. https://dailynigerian.com/tag/isaiah-bariki/
