Translation and Power Relations

The degree of cultural appropriation especially in Bible translation is also a reflection of the power relations between the source and receiving languages. Pym (2010a) alludes to this when he observes that prior to the Renaissance, European theorizing hardly saw languages as having equal value:

Much of medieval thinking assumed a hierarchy of languages, where some were considered intrinsically better than others. At the top were the languages of divine inspiration (Biblical Hebrew, New Testament Greek, Arabic, sometimes Sanskrit), then the languages of divinely inspired translation (the Greek of the Septuagint, the Latin of the Vulgate), then the

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national vernaculars, then the patois or regional dialects. (Pym 2010a: 22, emphasis in original)

Translation was thus seen as a way of enriching the languages on the lower rung of the hierarchy with values from languages on the higher rung, which explains why there were more translations downward the hierarchy from Hebrew or Greek to Latin, or from Latin to the vernaculars.

This supposedly intrinsic value of languages is appraised by the kind of information they are made to convey. Pym’s (2010a) hierarchy above suggests that this value lies in the perceived connection of the language with divinity: at the top of the hierarchy are languages perceived to be divinely inspired, followed by those into which divinely inspired texts have been translated. Forster (1958) would rather talk about the resources of languages based on their use as vehicles for intellectual discussion. In Western Europe, Latin was the language of intellectual and philosophical discussion, and “the vernaculars had no fixed terms to designate, for instance, certain philosophical concepts which were the commonplaces of schools”. The creation of new nations increased the statuses of the vernacular languages and thus resisted the dominance of Latin:

In the years after 1919, when languages which until then had virtually only been spoken by peasants became the vehicle of national culture, legal, political, philosophical and scientific discussion, which had previously been carried on in either Russian or German, had now to be conducted in, for instance, Lithuanian, Estonian or Lettish, languages whose literary tradition was that of folklore and whose scientific and philosophical resources were practically non-existent. (Forster 1958: 8)

Consequently, there was the need to devise a vast new terminology for these languages and the function of bringing them up to date intellectually was in the hands of translators. In other words, the less powerful languages, i.e., languages that did not have scientific and philosophical resources, relied on translations from the more powerful languages for vocabulary enrichment.

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The determination of the value of a language also goes beyond their association with divinity and the resources they are said to possess. It could simply be a case of the asymmetrical power relations between different cultures, members of these cultural groups and the languages they speak. This is the situation in colonial settings like India and Nigeria where English, being the language of the colonizer, has a higher social power than the languages of the colonized people. The official status of English in these settings now makes the languages of the colonized people minority languages. It is then not surprising that most studies of translations in minority languages “tend to be languages that are in contact with English: Irish in Ireland, Scots in Scotland, and French in Canada – a non-minority language that nevertheless occupies a non-minority position” (Branchadell 2005: 4).

The mention of French as a minority language in this context emphasizes the place of context in this discussion. While French might not be a minority language especially in France and with its large population of speakers around the world, it is a minority language in Canada. Similarly, while English is a major language in the world, it is a minority language in Cameroon²⁴. Furthermore, this asymmetry in power is demonstrated in Chan’s (2000) application of postcolonial translation theory to China even though China never experienced colonialism per se. The key factor here is that the minority languages are subordinate to the major ones. The case of China is seen in its position “in relation to existing modes of interpreting reality” (Simon 2000: 18), the reality in this context being postcolonial theories²⁵. China’s subordination in this context is then more political and cultural than colonial²⁶.

The power relations between English and Igbo could be seen at different levels. When the early Christian missionaries arrived Igboland in the first half of the 19^th century, they met a

24 Anchimbe (2016) notes that Cameroon was a colony of Germany, but after WW1, Germany was ousted and Cameroon was split between France and England, resulting in the emergence of francophone and anglophone Cameroon. According to Anchimbe (2016: 513), “[t]he anglophones occupy only two of the ten administrative regions, corresponding, according to the 2010 census projections, to 16.5% of the national population of 19 million people. From the population sizes of these two groups, the anglophones have always been the minority”. So, French is the major language in Cameroon and English a minority language.

25 Chan (2000) submits that the application of postcolonial theories to translations in China is akin to that in colonized contexts.

26 Chan (2000: 53) admits that some parts of China came under foreign powers, like Hong Kong ceded to Britain and Taiwan colonized by the Dutch and the Japanese, but this was not the case with “mainland China, where the majority of translations are still carried out and published”.

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people whose language served as a vehicle for intellectual discussions. The philosophy of the new religion, Christianity, was different and so translation served as the method of transferring this new intellectual tradition. English was at the time a minority language among the Igbo as very few people, those exposed to Christianity and western education, spoke it. Most missionary schools were run in Igbo. However, the enactment of the 1882 education ordinance changed the power relations between English and Igbo as English was now favoured by the missionaries. This is reinforced, on the one hand, by the Christian’s act of giving pejorative meanings, at times forcefully, to Igbo traditional religious practices, thereby making Christian converts to avoid associations with the traditional practices.

Conversion translated to getting exposed to English, and English thus became an index of a Christian identity. On the other hand, it is strengthened by colonialism, which invariably imposed English on the colonized population, a situation that has prevailed up till date as English is the major official language of Nigeria. Simon (2000:10) aptly captures the outcome of translations in colonial times:

Translations during the colonial period, we know, were an expression of the cultural power of the colonizer. Missionaries, anthropologists, learned Orientalists chose to translate the texts which corresponded to the image of the subjugated world which they wished to construct. Translations materialized modes of interpretation whose terms were rarely questioned.

This situation is replicated in Bible translations into Igbo during the missionary period. As expatiated in Oyali (2016) and in chapter 5, while the Igbo had their own conceptualizations of the spiritual, this was markedly different from the teachings of Christianity as embedded in the Bible. For instance, the Christian concept of the Supreme God was foreign to the Igbo people. Translating the Bible into Igbo thus created the need to have a term for this concept in Igbo. Although the missionaries used existing Igbo terms for the Christian God, the meanings given to the terms are markedly different from their earlier, pre-Christian meanings. In other words, the missionaries mapped their conceptualization of deities onto the Igbo conceptualization, thereby changing the

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cosmology of the Igbo, and this change has endured and is reproduced in subsequent translations of the Bible into Igbo.

Nonetheless, this did not go without some resistance from the Igbo. As elaborated in the next chapter, many Igbo Christian converts resisted some of the decisions of the missionaries, but their voices were suppressed by those of the European missionaries in positions of authority. With Nigeria’s attainment of independence in October 1960, a new set of IBTs were done, this time by native Igbo Christians with little or no external influence. Chapter 6 points up some lexical and graphological changes made in these translations by native Igbo agents, which are an attempt to reclaim the Igbo language as used in the missionaries’ translations and present the language the way Igbo speakers would want it. In other words, the IBTs become a site for resisting the missionaries’

construction of the language and for nationalism.

Furthermore, the asymmetrical power relations between English and Igbo is seen in the fact that religious translations are done more from English into Igbo and hardly the other way around (c.f. Oyali 2017a). It is also not a coincidence that all the IBTs were done from English based source texts. Commenting on the power play seen in the direction of translations between more powerful and less powerful languages, Mühleisen (2010: 260) notes that:

[t]he English language has an exceptional status here in that it has become such an overwhelming power player in the world of languages that it is not even deemed necessary to translate other languages into it – the expectation is that general-purpose, scholarly and recently to an increasing extent even literary texts are produced in English in the original publication.

Adejunmobi (1998: 165) calls this type of writing “compositional translation”, used to refer to “texts which are published in European languages and which contain occasional or sustained modifications of the conventions of the European language in use, where ‘versions’ or ‘originals’ in indigenous African languages are non-existent”. An example of a text in this category is Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Oyali (2010) also observes that some Igbo folklore existing in Igbo in the oral

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medium, were first written down in English. This power of English has been so expanded in the case of the Bible that English versions of the Bible have now become the source texts for subsequent translations of the Bible into other languages, as is the case with translations into Igbo.