The accessibility of translated Zulu health texts : an investigation of translation strategies

In disseminating information about health issues, government health departments and NGOs use, inter alia, written health texts. In a country like South Africa, these texts are generally written by medical experts and thereafter translated into the languages of the people. One of these languages is Zulu, which is spoken by the majority of South Africans. A large percentage of Zulu speakers are illiterate or semi-literate, especially in the rural areas. For this reason, Zulu translators have to use ‘simple’ language that these readers would understand when translating English texts into Zulu. Translators are expected to use strategies that can deal with non-lexicalized, problematic or other related terms that appear in health texts, as well as geographical and cultural constraints. This study focuses on the strategies used by Zulu translators in an attempt to make translated Zulu health texts accessible to the target readership. The investigation includes the use of self-administered questionnaires for respondents from two of South Africa’s nine provinces, where Zulu speakers are found (Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal), to determine whether the health texts do reach the target readership. Focus groups, semi-structured interviews and other complementary techniques were used to collect data from the selected respondents. Furthermore, a parallel concordance called ParaConc was used to extract and analyse data from the corpus as compiled for the present study, in an attempt to investigate the strategies used to make the translated health texts easier to read. The study uncovers various strategies which are used when translating English health texts into Zulu. These strategies include the use of loan words, paraphrasing, cultural terms and so on. In future, the use of ParaConc can be broadened to investigate newly discovered translation strategies, with the aim of making health texts more accessible to the target readers. Furthermore, this software programme can also be used to study translation strategies as used in other types of texts, for example journalistic texts.Linguistics and Modern LanguagesD. Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics (Translation Studies)

Ideology in the English translation of isiZulu praise poems

James Stuart, who collected and transcribed 258 isiZulu praise poems, demonstrated the significance of reducing isiZulu oral art such as praise poems to writing. Daniel Malcolm who translated them into English made their accessibility to the rest of the world possible. Later, Trevor Cope selected 26 from the 258 poems with their isiZulu versions, which he edited, annotated and published. The purpose of the present study is to explore the reflection of Trevor Cope’s ideology in his selection, which he entitled Izibongo – Zulu praise-poems, by using mainly paratextual elements. The exploration of extratexts is an attempt to link selected items to Cope’s ideology, which reveal conformity to the dominant ideology of the time

Referential cohesion in isiZulu translated health texts

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.Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2013, 31(3): 349–35

The translation of non-lexicalised words/terms by isiZulu health-text translators

The translators of isiZulu health texts very often have to deal with translation problems emanating from words or terms which are not yet lexicalised or which are problematic in isiZulu, such as the translation of terms relating to diseases, drugs/ointments and other medical concepts. This article focuses mainly on the use of vocabulary in solving these translation problems, with the aim of describing the decisions taken by translators. The health texts used in this article were collected between 2003 and 2006 from two South African provinces where isiZulu is spoken – Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal – as available at the distribution outlets of the national and provincial governments as well as from Soul City (a non-governmental organisation which entails a multimedia health-promotion and social-change project). The translation strategies as used by the isiZulu translators in solving the problem of non-lexicalised words/terms are examined by employing a combination of wordlist and concordance tools as well as by examining the titles of the texts. The results indicate that the translators’ decisions demonstrated an attempt to use acceptable expressions by conforming to the grammatical rules and patterns of the target language (isiZulu).Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2013, 31(2): 161–17

Lexical cohesion in the translation of English-Swahili health care texts

Lexical cohesion plays an integral role in ensuring that texts are cohesive. It is, however, not yet established if lexical cohesion remains the same once texts are translated from English into Swahili. It is against this backdrop that this article set out to describe the network of lexical chains in English-Swahili health care texts and establish if there is any variation in the use of lexical cohesion thereof. The data used in this study is extracted from Orang’i’s doctoral study. In this article, the researchers focused on lexical cohesion as the basis for manually comparing the coupled pairs. It is a descriptive-explanatory study. The researchers, first, found out that there is no significant difference in the lexical cohesion as used in both the source and target texts. Secondly, it was established that Swahili health care texts contain slightly more lexical items than their English counterparts. Translators, in an attempt to make explicit what may be considered implicit in the  target text if an equivalent lexical item is used, resort to using more synonyms and this makes them more cohesive. It also emerged that translators of health care texts have limited licence to significantly change the lexical items as used in the source texts