Religious Tokens and the Sacralisation of Justice and ‘Self-Essence’

A CriticalIntercultural Translation Analysis of the Igbo ‘Ofo’and ‘Chi’ Translated intoGerman

Abstract

Translation provides the space for the contact of different cultures and meanings in written texts. The
translator mediates these contacts and meanings providing clarity, as it were, to the pragmatics of
knowledge and cultural usages including cross-culturally and interculturally. The clarifications provided
by the translator are not only critical to intercultural understanding, they also mirror intercultural text
relations. This study adapts ethnography of communication to examine the translation of two religious
cultural tokens of the Igbo, ofo and chi, into German in Chinua Achebe‟s Things Fall Apart (TFA) and
Arrow of God (AOG). It traces the ethnographic allusions that informed the meaningfulness of these
tokens in Igbo cosmology and cultural usages and further identifies comparatively equivalent tokens in
Germanic/German traditional culture that foreground similar and/or divergent meanings in the textual
intercultural communication contact. The study showed how textual mediatory interventions of the
translator cut through and deep into cultural usages and cross-cultural meanings within the background of
intercultural asymmetrical contacts between Africa and Europe.