The sociolinguistic implications of English–Yoruba translation: An example of Adichie’s Zikora

Abstract

The success of translation depends on both the encoder and the decoder. The text under study is Zikora by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an African literary work rooted in the author’s Igbo sociocultural background but expressed in English. Translating it into Yoruba therefore makes the text multicultural. The purpose of this study is to examine the social, cultural, and linguistic influences of the source language on the target language, as well as to explore how translation challenges are addressed using appropriate typologies. This is a qualitative and descriptive study of an interlingual translation of an expressive text from English into Yoruba. The analysis is guided by Newmark’s (1981) contextual equivalence typology. Findings reveal that the syntactic structures of the two languages differ significantly, and that contextual factors play a crucial role in the transfer of meaning during the translation process. The study concludes that the context of childbirth is relatively universal. Consequently, language use in this domain is minimally influenced by culture, and where cultural influence does occur, meaning loss is limited.