The relationship between orality and translation is intimate and intricate. The very act of speaking, which sets humans apart from other living species, involves the translating of thought into audible words or speech. The survival of such thought is made possible through oral transmission, recording or writing, which are all interfaces that depend on an act of translation across language or various communication media.
Therefore, as an important feature of human speech and communication, orality continues to enjoy a growing interest as a concept underpinning research in many disciplines, including translation studies. Orality has featured prominently in studies related to pre-modernist traditions, modernist representations of the past, and postmodernist expressions of artistry such as audiovisual media. Its conceptualization may vary according to the research objectives or preoccupations of particular disciplines. Anthropologists and historians conceptualize orality as the medium of expression and discourse of non-literate cultures, while colonialists and Christian missionaries explored orality as a means to understanding so-called primitive or heathen societies for purposes of proselytism and civilization. Modernists have shown an anaphoric interest in orality mainly as a sounding board for calibrating the privileges of modernity. In more recent times, postmodernist preoccupations with orality have explored issues related to the representation of otherness, the assertion of marginalized identities through a variety of art forms such as literature, cinema, music, painting and the spoken word. In these various disciplines or approaches, translation or interpretation is indispensable as the conduit for the recording, textualization, representation or appraisal of orality. Thanks to the influential work of scholars such as Albert Lord (The Singer of Tales, 1960), Jack Goody (The Domestication of the Savage Mind, 1977) and Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 1982), orality has shed its negative image as primitive, unwritten, non-literate and exotic, and grown into a major field of scientific interest and the focus of interdisciplinary research including translation studies.
The increasing presence of research on orality in translation studies seems to follow two main trajectories that can be distinguished in terms of a pragmatic or metaphorical conceptualization of translation. From a pragmatic perspective, orality can be explored through the study of intra- and interlinguistic or intersemiotic translation practice. In this approach the focus is often on the treatment of the materiality of orality. This has opened up interdisciplinary work in various areas such as (post)colonialism, gender and cultural studies, intersemiotic and intercultural communication studies, or film and media studies. From a metaphorical standpoint, translation research on orality often deals with issues related to the representation of otherness or alterity, marginalized identities, minority or subaltern language cultures, etc., in the context of interculturality and transnationalism. The metaphorical conceptualization of translation allows for an investigation of the rapport between orality and translation in a variety of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, including the classics, history, theology, anthropology, sociology, archaeology and the fine arts. These research areas and disciplines are fertile ground for exploring the intersection between research on orality and translation studies.
The articles in this special issue are a testimony to the growing significance of orality and the various transdisciplinary research that showcase orality as an important research domain in translation studies. They explore orality from Antiquity to the present day and cover a wide range of practices and traditions. The intersection between orality and translation is explored in ways that highlight the importance of both in human history and in important cultural spheres such as literature, religion and historiography.
Siobhán McElduff's article acquaints us with the oral translation practices of Roman Antiquity and highlights the significance of oral performance in ancient Roman translation. It confronts orality and writing and shows how the art of rhetoric and speech was of prime concern for Roman translation, which was often conceived for public oratory. Lourens de Vries looks at the various conceptualizations of orality and the role they played in the theory and practice of Bible translation. These conceptualizations have evolved from a view of orality shaped by the main ideologies of nineteenth-century Germany to universalist constructions of orality based on a strict separation between oral and written communication in mid-twentieth-century linguistics, anthropology and philology, and ultimately to a definition of orality in late-twentieth-century biblical scholarship and linguistics based on a rejection of universalist constructs and an emphasis on the interconnectedness of the oral–written interface and the local specificity of such an interface. Cynthia Miller-Naudé et al. tackle the issue of translating between oral traditions with a significant distance in temporality and in culture. Using insights from biblical performance criticism, they explore through translation the similarities and differences between the orality of the Old Testament and the orality of Sesotho.
Elena Di Giovanni and Uoldelul Chelati Dirar discuss orality and translation in the Horn of Africa, an area that is rich in oral history, and its role in translation in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial times. The historical importance of this region outweighs its sparse representation in translation studies on Africa. This may account for the lopsided view of directionality in translation on the continent, which is often based on a strict division of horizontal translation practice as pre-colonial and vertical translation as (post)colonial. Focusing on orally transmitted knowledge among others, the authors highlight instances of multidirectional writing and translation processes from a historical perspective. Kathryn Batchelor proposes a new approach to reading orality-inflected literature in postcolonial contexts and illustrates its impact on the theory and practice of translating African literature. Drawing from trauma theory, Batchelor raises the possibility of reading orality in African literature not just as the result of a deliberate mining of African oral tradition, but also as a consequence of the writing and translation of trauma. Using as a case study a novel on child soldiers, she shows how markers of orality can indeed be construed as markers of trauma. This enhances postcolonial translation criticism by blending the concepts of “translation-of-orality” and “translation-of-trauma”, with significant implications for postcolonial translation theory.
Alexandra Assis Rosa takes a more pragmatic approach by viewing orality in terms of the orality-inflected discourse of characters in fiction, such as in speech and dialogue. Orality here becomes an important marker of social class and prestige, and defines sociolectal practices that highlight the inverse proportionality between orality and literacy. In other words, orality is a strong marker of identity and sociocultural value, which must be accounted for in interlingual transfer. The article explores the topic of linguistic variation in the context of the representation of language varieties in fiction and the problems the latter pose for interlingual translation. This article is unique in that it does not deal with orality as the fundament of the tradition or culture of a people, but rather views orality in light of the speech habits of a segment of a linguistic community. The metalinguistic characteristic of such speech as a marker of social class, prestige and level of literacy must be conveyed in translation by paying particular attention to the fictionalized oral aesthetics. This is demonstrated through a case study of the translation of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist into European Portuguese.
Exploring various markers of orality in the North African novel, Mustapha Ettobi shows how these markers are unevenly dealt with in European-language translations. This provides the basis for confronting translation strategies such as assimilation versus non-assimilation, domestication versus foreignization, literal versus non-literal, and fluency versus opacity. Ettobi cautions that these dichotomies are not always clear-cut and the rationale for their use not always predictable. Furthermore, the choice of translation strategies for orality-inflected markers may not be neutral or innocent, but rather ideologically driven. The translation of Arabic literature into European languages has quite often been influenced by orientalist thinking, and this has been evident in the treatment of markers of orality that have variously been suppressed, enhanced, exaggerated or exoticized.
Judging from the variety of perspectives or approaches showcased in the articles in this special issue, the intersection of research on orality and translation is fertile ground for interdisciplinary work in the humanities and social sciences. Hopefully, this volume will set the groundwork for more collaborative endeavours between translation studies and those disciplines with an interest in orality as an important area for scientific research.
Note on contributor
Paul F. Bandia is professor of French and translation studies at Concordia University in Canada, and an associate fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute in the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research at Harvard University. With interests in translation theory and history, postcolonial studies, and cultural theory, he has published widely in the fields of translation studies and postcolonial literatures and cultures. He is the author of Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa (2008), editor of Writing and Translating Francophone Discourse: Africa, the Caribbean, Diaspora (2014), and co-editor of Charting the Future of Translation History (2006) and Agents of Translation (2009), as well as the first issue of TTR vol. 23 Rencontres Est-Ouest/East-West Encounters (2010).