Strategies employed in the English literal translation of some selected proverbs in Mokitimi's (1997)

Abstract

As translation involves working with two different languages and cultures, a translator is often forced to deal with various translation challenges during a translation process. Obviously, when a translator is faced with such challenges, they resort to translation strategies which are applied to a text in order to give solutions to the challenges that they encounter during the translation process. The main interest of this study, therefore, is to examine various translation strategies which Mokitimi (1997) used in order to literally render the English translation of some Sesotho proverbs, in her publication entitled The Voice of the People. This also includes exploration of the communicative contexts in which such strategies have been employed and their strengths in literally rendering the meanings of Sesotho proverbs into English. The data of this qualitative study is organised and examined using the basic methods of content analysis and its discussion or interpretation is guided by the theoretical premises of the Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) theory. This theory advocates for a target-oriented approach to translation and as a result its principles and concepts have been employed to argue that Mokitimi’s choice of strategies was generally target-oriented. A purposively selected sample of twenty-seven (27) excerpts revealed that Mokitimi (1997) employed compensation strategy, translation by a scientific term, cultural substitution, translation by a superordinate term, and explicitation in her English literal translations of Sesotho proverbs. The study makes an observation that, the mentioned strategies have been employed in various communicative contexts. Such contexts are: where wrong interpretation was possible, where an equivalent word was unknown to Mokitimi, where a specific word was either unknown to the translator or non-existent in the ix target language, where a culture-bound concept was used in the source text, and lastly, where Mokitimi as a translator felt the need to add some further details in the target language. The study also unveiled that there are merits to each strategy that Mokitimi (1997) employed. For instance, the study argued that, compensation strategy has been advantageous in minimising confusion on the part of the target reader. Translation by a scientific term is said to be an effective strategy, in facilitating the process of translation while translation by a superordinate word helped Mokitimi in overcoming a relative lack of specificity in the target language, as well as unfamiliarity with a specific term in the target language. In addition, the study has confirmed cultural substitution to be an effective strategy in providing the English readership with a concept with which they are familiar and which has the same impact as the source concept. Finally, the observation made with regard to explicitation strategy is that, Mokitimi has been able to bridge the non-equivalence gap that existed between Sesotho and English.