Referential cohesion in isiZulu translated health texts

Abstract

The aim of this study was to look into how isiZulu translators deal with the translation of English reference items in health texts. The researcher believes that this is a problem that needs attention since isiZulu is structurally different from English, and the use of reference cohesion is a crucial aspect in textuality. The researcher discovered that research done on this subject for the benefit of African languages in particular is scarce. The selected health texts were a sub-corpus of the health texts that the researcher collected between 2003 and 2006 for his doctoral studies, which he completed in 2009 (Ndlovu, 2009). In this article, the researcher focused on reference cohesion and reiteration (a component of lexical cohesion which complements reference cohesion). The researcher used, mainly, Barlow's ParaConc's software program to analyse the data, and the shorter selected texts were analysed manually. The researcher discovered that the translators translated the English pronouns with isiZulu subject and object concords. Examples are provided where English demonstrative pronouns were translated with their isiZulu equivalents, and there were examples were isiZulu nouns did not differentiate between the English articles ‘the’ and ‘a’. Instances were also found where demonstratives were used for the English definite ‘the’, and the translators seemed to show a degree of freedom in translating lexical cohesion.