Translation, Femality and Child Mortality in African Literature and their German Versions
Keywords:
Ogbanje/abiku, female, language gender sensitivity, translationAbstract
In the traditional African society, there exist various beliefs about the health conditions of young and old, male and female and the Ogbanje/abiku myth is one of them. Ogbanje/abiku phenomenon bespeaks the mysterious health challenge surrounding child mortality in the African context. Today medical explanations have been offered for it (Uche and Uche 2015) and this traditional belief is also present in African literary texts (McCabe 2002). However, there has been no study focusing on the representation of the female as a stereotype of ailing ogbanje/abiku in Anglophone African texts and their German translations. This study therefore examines how translation contributes to the representation of the female as the typical gender of ogbanje/abiku in five African Postcolonial literary works. The analysis is based on the theory of translation as an intercultural writing and works on gender sensitivity in the English and German languages. This is with the aim of showing that gender sensitivity in English and German languages plays a significant role in portraying and projecting the female as the stereotype of an ogbanje/abiku. The study concludes that gender sensitivity in a language plays a role in the discrimination against females in stereotyping them as typical of having such a health challenge in African Europhone literature.
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Websites
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogbanje (13/10/2015)
www.jcl.sagepub.com/content/22/1/17.citation (05.12.2015)
