A Comparison of Gender Representation in the English and Yoruba Versions ofAchebe’s Things Fall Apart

Abstract

Extant studies on gender representation in proverbs and sexism have considered it in terms of culture,
linguistics and literature. Such studies on proverbs approach it rather from the aspect of indigenous
culture and few studies like Arua & Yusuf (2010) consider this in terms of sexist language use.
Concerning this, very little has been done on sexism and proverb translation. This study intends to fill this
gap by considering the issue of gender representation through sexist language use in proverbs and their
translation. The Contrastive Analysis approach is used to analyse the Yoruba translations of Igbo
proverbs written in English in Chinua Achebe‟s Things Fall Apart. The Yoruba translation of the source
text is titled Igbesi Aye Okonkwo. It was discovered that, unlike the English source text, the Yoruba target
text is non-sexist in gender representation when transferring the proverbs into the target language.