Toyin
Cinema depends on subtitles, or dubbing, to reach out to mass audiences.
There is nothing elite about translating, in a sense, since another mass audience can be reached through translations of texts.
In Europe, especially france, dubbing is used for commercial films; subtitles for art house films
But translating books, not globally popular but just good books, African authored books, runs around $20,000 per book, and very few publishers can afford that. They need subventions. I know you know this; I am writing this for the list.
That is elitist, I guess. Unfortunately.
As far as setting translation of religious texts for mass audiences, versus scholarship, why not. They are apples and oranges. If the sultan's goal is to advance broad religious knowledge, let him translation for the general readership. I see no harm in that.
I believe there is value in advancing scholarly knowledge, too, but the monies to support that, like the nea, often have to come from a reasonable national government. With trump we will descend into the dark ages.
If you are asking the people in "new York" to learn hausa in order to study hausa language texts, why not. Let's face the reality that few will do so. Again, scholarship is of real value; but there is real, true, good value in the study of translated texts. Toyin, my degree was in comparative literature. If I have any regrets over my long career, it was in not having studied wolof in 1983 when I lived in Dakar. Instead I devoted myself to perfecting French so I could read the actual literature being written in French around the continent, including in n Africa. Only specialists worked closely on African languages. I do not regret not having become a specialist: I love all African literatures, and am glad I could read them in English, French, or translation. Without translations, I wouldn't have known African oral literatures, which I taught over the years to probably close to thousands of students. Ditto for lusophone, for Swahili language texts, etc. why must it be only one? Can't our goal be to have the originals published in their languages, and use translations for the best?
As for using African languages for higher education, you are oversimplifying the question. If you asked me if you should study wolof, let's say, and use it up to the level of the ph d, in Dakar, I'd say two or three things. One, if it is a question of studying wolof history or literature, you have to be fluent in the tongue to use it at a university level. Just as our students need to know Yoruba if they want to be specialists in Nollywood cinema (or hausa, if they are doing the north); and learning igbo for igbo films would be something I would want to require of my students too.
If they are studying math at the college level, and did not know English, or even French I suppose, you would be isolating them from the scholarship that requires connections with publications and conferences around the world. Those conferences are held in English. As moses said, it is not a "national language" in that instance. It is a global language.
I can say, like it or not. I spend a lot of time in france, and frankly I usually am put off, or detest, the encounters with English—they are targeting people who do not know French, and my goal remains to try to function in French when in france. if I could function in wolof in Dakar, my experience would be immeasurably enriched.
But in Nigeria, if you insist the entire faculty function just in ijo, whom would you be excluding? Not only other Nigerians, but also those outside Nigeria, like me, who might wish to lecture there, or connect with the students there, etc.
Wolof is not the only language that matters in Senegal: you can't exclude nnon-wolof speakers, or insist all students master it, to function. That's what Selassie did with his crazy Amharic requirements in Ethiopia—a horrendous policy that only accentuated the repression of others—in fact of the majority of the country.
You have to distinguish between disciplines. The positive goals you cite at the end of your intervention below are completely relevant in the arts and humanities, and I agree with them. They are counterproductive in the sciences.
I guess I would have to say that we can't hold on to our languages at all cost. The costs are too high. My father studied Yiddish in his old age; and me, I hope to study a few languages now that I am on the threshold of retirement. But not so as to preserve them—rather so as to enjoy entering into their worlds.
The English that I speak, that is changing daily with the inclusion of phrases and words that I can't stand—is alive, and you and I can't stop that process from happening.
On the other hand, the series of books I edit for msu press is very interested in African texts in translation from African languages. Our board of about 20 people all emphasized that, so many of us agree with the spirit of your goals. I agree we are mutually empowered when using African languages in relation to their texts and cultures, and ideally the comparative studies would include work on the languages. I see it in my field, literature, cinema. Not STEM, not medicine, and definitely not for airplane pilots, all of whom when doing international flying have to use English, even in their home countries. Weird, but true.
And this is true even for the language of music, without words; of dance. Yes, of all the cultural arts, of all the philosophical, intellectual uses of language. But not physics.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday 21 March 2017 at 10:05
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
Ken:
We keep elevating the discussion. But I get more and more confused.
Are we embedded in an elite project?
1. projects of translation, and adoption of certain ways of using languages can become framed as an elite project. Did Soyinka translate Fagunwa's book for a massive public consumption? No, it is still an elite project. I was with the Sultan some years ago, and he was doing massive reproduction of Fodio's works and other Islamic scholars in the very language which they used to produce them. I offered a strong endorsement. Is this not more important than thinking of people based in New York who are interested in that knowledge to write essays for their CV?
2. If the people in New York are interested in Fodio, you need to convince me why those who produced the text should also be the translators for them. Why can't you make the argument that the people in New York should go and learn Hausa and Ajami to access the text? So, why is this model different from that of an academic plantation?
3. I am a fisherman in the Niger Delta, what do I care if texts are translated? If Ijo or Ogoni work well for me, why can't tmy languages be further developed to enhance my citizenship and relevance as a human being? And If I go the University of Port Harcout, what is wrong for my University to allow me to write my PhD in Ijo language if this is what I prefer?
I am looking for answers that will tell us how we can maximize the ability of indigenous languages to:
1. become part of the critical platform for development;
2. the empowerment of communities in ways in which politics and social engineering are built on their epistemologies and they can take whatever they want from others; and
3. How African languages will become fully entrenched, never die, and then become reproduced through the education system at all levels.
I don't have any example that I know of where the use of a language external to a people can truly be claimed to be the definitive transformational agency. Before I get some arrows directed at me, I am not making an opposite claim that if the Tiv use Tiv at all levels of education system, they will become developed, as this is counterfactual as well.
I don't have an answer to all the questions I pose.
To: dialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Cc: Tunde Bewaji <tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>, "john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm" <john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
Hi all
I'd like to refer to moses's fourth point, the question of translation, so that cultural production not remain local.
As I work in literature and cinema, that issue is and has been for a long time a central question in African studies. Achebe vs ngugi.
Ngugi advocated writing in African languages, so as to remain true to the cultural, epistemological values.
Why not? One of my favorite writers among contemporary African authors, boris boubacar diop, opted to begin writing in wolof, and produced a magnificent novel, doomi golo.
On the other hand, if ngugi turned to writing in kikuyu, please note he then turned around and translated it into English for wider dissemination. Are there any novels or plays by ngugi that he has not had translated and published in English?
Soyinka translated a fagunwa novel—had that not happened, fagunwa would remain known only to Yoruba speakers. That is no worse than having Shakespeare known only to English speakers; but when the germans translated Shakespeare into german, that gave a tremendous boost to his expansion onto the world stage. Similarly when freud was translated into French, that enabled lacanian analysis (and the training for fanon) to become disseminated widely. When Lacan became translated into English, film studies and feminist studies turned deeply toward psychoanalytical approaches. Should I go on?
In film studies, carmela garritano distinguished between local twi films made in Ghana for local audiences. Had the films all remained in twi, they would have remained confined to accra and its region. But filmmakers like Shirley frimpong-manso wanted to make films that could be distributed world-wide, she turned to English, as well as to what Ghanaians termed professional looks, to polished post-production, as we have now seen in afolayan's films
Now, folks, if afolayan's films did not have English, or if there were no sub-titles, we who don't speak the languages he employs in his films would be at a loss.
Subtitles, translations, these are how works enter into the global waves of culture. Not everyone wants to do this: but if you and I were to actually sit and talk about African literature, we have to have a text that we share in common, and that means sharing a language.
Let the author decide what language works for him or her in writing a novel. But he or she can't control what languages others know. You can write for your own community, or reach out to others. And if you make a film that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions, you'd better find a way to reach the audience. That might well entail using hausa in northern Nigerian. And if your ambition is to go further, it has to be translated, subtitled, or dubbed.
Lastly, the original almost always is better than the translation. Much is always lost in subtitling. But a great translator can create something even better than the original.
As example might be seen in the adaptation of carmen by jo ramaka, his film karmen gei. I wouldn't want to ask which is better, ramaka or bizet's version: both are wonderful.
And of course, shakespeare's own plays were based on earlier written texts as well. Texts written in other languages. Without translation there'd have been no Shakespeare either. We live by sharing across culture, and culture breathes when it can reach outside its own closely confined world.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meochonu@gmail.com" <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 20 March 2017 at 11:30
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Cc: "tunde.bewaji@gmail.com" <tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>, "john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm" <john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
It is sad to see this edifying discussion degenerate into this, but a few quick points preceded by a declaration:
I have been following the thread and the contributions of Farooq and Ken have captured by own position so excellently that I saw no need to contribute. After reading Oga Falola's penultimate post, however, I feel that a few submissions would be in order.
1. Despite the effort of the mild-mannered and polite scholar, Ken Harrow, to explain that the notion of English being the property of the British or of Euro-America is wrong, some responses have continued to proceed from that erroneous, ironically neocolonial idea. Falola challenged us to name countries that have developed by operationalizing the languages of other people, implying that English is not Nigerians' property, that it belongs to others. It is only if you believe this foundational fallacy that you'd believe that when Nigerians master English, they are embracing someone else's linguistic heritage and abandoning their own--the largely outmoded argument about about linguistic imperialism. It should be self-evident that the notion of linguistic imperialism dissolves considerably when the language in question is now democratized and domesticated in several locales and when the original possessors of that language have lost control of it while those who adopted it have shaped and reshaped it in line with their own communicative and cultural predilections. Even the canonization of standard English was not--is not--an exclusively Euro-American affair as stakeholders in the language's multiple varieties have contributed to the institution and convention we now know as standard English.
2. There is also, in Falola's and others' contributions, the erroneous assumption that Euro-American modernity--or modernity as a generic category--inheres in English. This is a claim made by generations of Eurocentric scholars and hegemons. It has been challenged successfully by postcolonial theorists, literary scholars, historians, and others, who have rightly sought to decenter modernity, locate it in multiple locales, practices, discourses, and linguistic communities, and to puncture the claim of haughty imperialists that they bestowed modernity on benighted subalterns through the instrumentality of the English language and English language education. Mainstream concepts such as parallel modernities, vernacular modernities, alternative modernities, etc--which we now take for granted as commonsensical givens--signal how successful the project of provincializing Europe and its modernity and of recognizing modernity's polyvalent manifestation and provenance has been. Yet some contributors here seem to be reifying this debunked claim and inadvertently rehabilitating it through their claim that modernity is coextensive with the English language. Even the British colonial variety of modernity, encoded in post-Enlightenment claims to universality, is not as Euro-American in provenance as was previously thought. You only need to read Simon Gikandi's Maps of Englishness to know that colonial subalterns in non-Western locales helped constitute and reconstitute the iconic edifices of Englishness and its associated modernity.
3. Therefore, it is problematic to equate the mastery of English with a capitulation to a "foreign" English modernity or culture. That culture, to begin with, is hardly English in the strict Manichean way some are arguing here. Colonial culture and colonial modernity are as Nigerian as they are English. There were as many subaltern actors in making colonial modernity as there were English people. Secondly, it is condescending and even a tad insulting to Nigerians to imply as some have done here that they are incapable of separating the linguistic utilitarian benefits of English from its cultural components--that in fact when they choose to master English in order to participate in global professional and intellectual currents or to be conversant in the dominant epistemic vocabulary of our world, they are assimilating to a foreign culture. Nigerians are capable of smartly adopting the utilitarian ethos of English without uncritically embracing whatever cultural resources may be conveyed by the language. We as scholars should not arrogantly infantilize our African subjects, who are in most cases smarter and more pragmatic than we give them credit for. Nigerians do not need to be protected or shielded from what we assume to be the culturally corrosive effects of English mastery. They are capable of making a distinction between the ways of the English and the globally utilitarian language called English.
4. Much of the attack on English by people whose intellectual and professional trajectories have been defined by a mastery of standard English seems driven by a simplistic and self-destructive Afrocentric impulse. Self-writing is a noble endeavor, but it becomes counterproductive when it devolves into epistemic self-isolation. If indeed Africa possesses a rich intellectual and scholarly heritage that we complain is yet to be shared with or recognized by the broader global world of scholarship how can the solution be to further isolate this heritage from the global intellectual pool by enunciating it in Africa's languages, which are unintelligible to outsiders? I don't get this type of logic. It seems to me that the urgent task facing Africanists is to seek pathways into consequential global scholarly and intellectual conversations, pathways through which the insights and contributions of African vernacular and other epistemologies can enter into dialogue with epistemologies of other places and eventually take its place in the arenas where paradigms and consensuses are consecrated. If we publish and write in our languages, we are writing for for ourselves, essentially. How is such an incestuous intellectual enterprise going to enable African epistemology to enter into the global scholarly marketplace and be appreciated and engaged with? There is already a model for subaltern epistemologies entering the global English-language epistemological canon. Indian social scientific and humanistic scholars are today some of the most influential in the world, but they did not enter into global scholarly reckoning by complaining about linguistic imperialism or advocating for a return to Indic languages, modes of self-representation, and esoteric discourse, but by translating the unique insights and properties of Indic vernacular epistemologies into English and specifically into the high theoretical academic lingo of the Euro-Americn academy. Western theorists and academics took notice. They had to. They began to engage Indian scholarship on its own terms but they did so only because the language in which this scholarship came to them was relatable, familiar. There was a shared linguistic space where productive engagement was possible. Pius Adesanmi has a brilliant article that documents and analyzes this process. By all means let us create platforms for indigenous African knowledge to thrive, but let us also prioritize translation, not just in the mechanical or literal sense but also in the epistemic sense of transporting entire intellectual repertoires from our localized and limited languages into a language and lexicon that is intelligible to global scholarly audiences. For good or ill, that linguistic medium is English, along with its associated disciplinary jargons.
5. Malami's narrative is a great example of providing recognition and visibility to vernacular African scholars and intellectuals, but it is ultimately an incestuous enterprise. To really bring the caliphate's intellectual heritage as espoused by Talata Mafara and Waziri Junaid to the world and gain recognition for its unique contributions to scholarship, you need to translate the ideas and productions into English and not allow it to be accessible only to Hausa- and Ajami-literate people. In the same Sokoto example, how could a non-Hausa speaking person in the audience have accessed the insightful points the Waziri made? By the way, we have Hausa and Arabic departments in most universities in the far north of Nigeria. These are a self-enclosed intellectual communities with a shared medium of intelligibility where scholarship and scholarly conversations are conducted in Hausa and Arabic. It seems to me that rather than railing against English and raising the straw man of an Anglophilic educational curriculum, we should be asking the departments of Hausa and the departments of Arabic and Islamic studies to collaborate and promote the study of this caliphate corpus and their producers while also promoting the work of translation to bring this vast scholarship into the global scholarly mainstream, which is at present English-denominated.
On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 7:44 AM, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
To the great minds, let us stay close to the arguments. The thread on language is a good one as we all are seeking answers. Indeed, I have been forwarding them to UNESCO and the African Union.
Whenever I am on the road, I contract the moderation of the site, and I also press the button without reading.
I must confess that I am reading the insult and counter-insult for the first time. I apologize.
I will do my private calls as usual.
I take full responsibility.
TF
Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
104 Inner Campus Drive
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222 (fax)
From: dialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, March 20, 2017 at 6:36 AM
To: dialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Cc: Tunde Bewaji <tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>, "john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm" <john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - "An advice, " "a good news": Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 3:52 AM, 'Ayotunde Bewaji' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
lgnorance breeds arrogance. A tale told by any idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Komolafe is right, "May God save us from ourselves". We should give the last word to Oga Farooq, and done. That way there shall be linguistic peace in the land, and Boko Haram will vanish. Shikena. Ire o.
Ayotunde,
You should know about ignorance because you embody it. The thoughtless, dimwitted excerpt above shows the depth of the ignorance that holds your fatuous mind hostage. When people are denuded of substance and have no capacity for deep intellectual engagement, they get into an unwarranted vituperative frenzy and throw cheap, pedestrian insults at their intellectual superiors. Do you have anything intelligent to contribute to the debate? Of course not. It's above your intellectual pay grade. Your sterile, vacuous mind has no capacity to grasp complex, nuanced thoughts, so all you do here is post inane, insult-ridden gibberish. Since the discussion has degenerated to this low ebb, I am out. I am disappointed that Professor Falola would allow this malicious illiteracy to escape moderation.
Farooq
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science Building
Room 5092 MD 2207
402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State UniversityKennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperog
Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will--
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