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