Orality and Translation

In the current context of globalization, relocation of cultures, and rampant technologizing of communication, orality has gained renewed interest across disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. Orality has shed its once negative image as primitive, non-literate, and exotic, and has grown into a major area of scientific interest and the focus of interdisciplinary research, including translation studies. As an important feature of human speech and communication, orality has featured prominently in studies related to pre-modernist traditions, modernist representations of human history, and postmodernist expressions of artistry such as in music, film, and other audiovisual media. Its wide appeal can be seen in the variety of this volume, in which contributors draw from a range of disciplines with orality as the point of intersection with translation studies. This book is unique in its exploration of orality and translation from an interdisciplinary perspective, and sets the groundwork for collaborative research among scholars across disciplines with an interest in the aesthetics and materiality of orality. This book was originally published as a special issue of Translation Studies.

Introduction: Orality and translation1. Speaking as Greeks, speaking over Greeks: Orality and its problems in Roman translation2. Views of orality and the translation of the Bible 3. Similarity and alterity in translating the orality of the Old Testament in oral cultures4. Reviewing directionality in writing and translation: Notes for a history of translation in the Horn of Africa5. Orality, trauma theory and interlingual translation: A study of repetition in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas oblige6. Translating orality, recreating otherness 7. Translating orality in the postcolonial Arabic novel: A study of two cases of translation into English and French

Paul F. Bandia is Professor of French and Translation Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, and an Associate Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, MA, USA. 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.