African Perspectives on Literary Translation - Paperback

by Judith Inggs (Editor), Ella Wehrmeyer (Editor)

This collection serves as a showcase for literary translation research with a focus on African perspectives, highlighting theoretical and methodological developments in the discipline while shedding further light on the literary landscape in Africa.

The book offers a framework for understanding key approaches and topics in literary translation situated in the African context, covering foundational concepts as well as new directions within the field. The first half of the volume focuses on the translation product, exploring such topics as translation strategies, literary genres, and self-translation, while the second half examines process and reception, allowing for an in-depth look at agency, habitus, and ethics. Each chapter is structured to allow for the introduction of a given theoretical aspect of literary translation followed by a summary of a completed research project with an African focus showing theory in practice, offering a model for readers to build their own literary translation research projects while also underscoring the range of perspectives and unique challenges to literary translation work in Africa.

This unique volume is a key resource for students and scholars in translation studies, giving visibility to African perspectives on literary translation while pointing the way forward for future research directions.

Author Biography

Judith Inggs is Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. With numerous publications over the last several decades, one of the most recent is a monograph on South African Young Adult fiction. Her latest project focuses on the reception of South African young adult fiction in Europe.

Ella Wehrmeyer is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at North-West University, South Africa. Having obtained her DLitt. et Phil. from the University of South Africa in 2013, her research focuses on corpus-based translation and interpreting studies. The author of numerous publications, she created the first sign language interpreting corpus and is constructing a literary translation corpus.