A Comparison of Gender Representation in the English and Yoruba Versions of Achebe’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 Yorub