Translating

Representative:

Clarissa Vierke Clarissa.Vierke@uni-bayreuth.de

PI Members:

Thoko Kaime, Alena Rettová, Eva Spies, Clarissa Vierke (University of Bayreuth)

Overview

Understood in the sense of conveying meaning across or between languages, translating fundamentally constitutes and characterises both the multilingual life-worlds that we in African Studies address, as well as the everyday work and cooperation of our Cluster itself. In RS Translating we will study not only these language-related aspects, but also the production and circulation of concepts, policies and practices within and between multilingual contexts as processes of translating.

In the entangled world(s) of today, linguistic translation – now often facilitated by AI, most often in and out of English – plays an ambivalent role that has long troubled scholars in African Studies, in as much as it enables exchanges but also levels differences. With regard to Africa, we increasingly observe the emergence of a more multipolar world and, with it, the rise of new hegemonic claims reflected in new linguistic dynamics and translation processes: Nigerian Pentecostal global missionary campaigns being carried out using simultaneous translation in multiple languages; growing numbers of Confucius centres and Mandarin language classes; and massive investment by countries such as Russia, Iran and China in the production of social media content in African languages, for example. Together with diasporic and local initiatives to safeguard African languages, these emergent dynamics bypass state efforts of standardisation, monolingual ideologies and longstanding Western monopolies.

In RS Translating we will study how languages and practices of translating re-establish dynamic relations between words and worlds, crossing spatial, moral, political and artistic boundaries to produce new ways of being, seeing and living together, generating different but entangled worlds.

Our research will be structured according to three lines of inquiry:

(1) We will empirically study translation in action, here understood in terms of the multiple negotiations, approximations and interceptions that constantly occur in everyday interactions in multilingual contexts, across a variety of languages. Going beyond notions of translating as a simple search for (e.g. linguistic) equivalence, we will study a range of relational, socio-material practices (taking place, e.g., in schools; as part of artistic production processes; or during court cases or sermons), including their bodily and technological aspects.

(2) Our empirical research on translation beyond transfer will deal with translation in relation to the discursive construction of global conceptual models or knowledge regimes in specific fields, such as those of education, human rights legislation or development policy. Here, we will interrogate the construction of a so-called one-world world – a world reduced to, and by, the singular logic of universal meta-categories and the dominant monolingual systematisation of subordinated languages, religions, cultures, legal systems and ethnic identities to which Africa has been continuously subjected (see 4.1.4). Grounding our inquiries in the Cluster’s three core concepts of multiplicity, reflexivity and relationality that, taken together, call into question the hierarchical relations between ‘the Western universal’ and ‘the African particulars’, we will inquire as to the status and interconnections of universalisms in today’s entangled world.

(3) Our third line of inquiry, rethinking universalisms is thus intended as a critical intervention, scrutinising the ethical dimensions of practices and studies of translating, which can be oppressively complicit with the universalist reduction and levelling of differences. Instead, we suggest a shift to the study and practice of translating as an incessant relational process, exploring translation ‘from language to language’ (Diagne et al., 2020, p. 18) as joint work in a shared world where universalising is understood as a specific, bounded ethical project. Translating in this sense refers to forms of creative dialogue across epistemes and languages, and hence to ways of negotiating our multiple common world(s).

Thus, our core aim in RS Translating is to critically engage with the ongoing production, emergence and contestation of socio-material worlds in which hegemonic claims and exclusionary essentialisms continue to persist or (re)emerge, yet in which languages and epistemes also go on troubling, testing and enriching each other, and opening up new ways to make worlds.