What is it about?

Interest in African literature and translation is relatively new; it mainly emerged in the 1990s with the postcolonial turn in translation studies. Many African writers describe themselves as cross-cultural translators and ask the following questions: Is it a form of self-denigration not to use one’s mother tongue as a medium of literary creation? How can their literary creations account for their postcolonial experience in the languages of former colonizers? Can these languages render the specificities of their distinct cultural worldviews?

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Why is it important?

The linguistic choice made by African writers is hence highly political because it involves a compromise that rests on power relations. Their writing often involves a sort of translation from Source Language (SL) to Target Language (TL) whether through cross-cultural inner translation or self-translation.

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This page is a summary of: Ethnotextual mental translation and self-translation in African literature, Ars Aeterna, December 2017, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/aa-2017-0010.
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