West African Narratives of Slavery: Texts from Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ghana

A Note on the Translations

A NoTE oN THE TrANSLATIoNS All the texts that are analyzed here required some form of translation. Four of the five narratives were written (or contained sections that were penned) in the Ewe language. These include the life history of Aaron Kuku, the biography of Yosef Famfantor, segments of Paul Sands’s diary, and the oral narratives about the Atorkor kidnappings. One of the narratives, the biography of Lydia Yawo, was written and published in German. Another document, an account of the history of Atorkor that I appended to the Atorkor oral texts, was also published in German. A great deal has been written about the translation process, whether it involves texts of great literary value (a group that does not include the narratives presented here) or ones that are more technical or prosaic in orientation. Debates rage about the capacity to truly transfer meaning from one language to another, whether or not to take a literal or free approach to the translation process , whether or not to focus on particular linguistic units (sentences and phrases) only or also to translate these elements in relation to larger cultural contexts. None of these concerns are discussed here. Instead I focus on the particular issues faced by the translators of the texts included in this study of West African narratives of slavery. All the translators sought to be as faithful as possible to the source texts, converting into the English language the meanings , phrasing, and the spirit of the original texts. In many instances, they encountered no problems at all. Difficulties did arise in some instances, however. The discussion here will focus on those areas that proved to be challenging to one degree or another. First, however, it is important to say something about the translators themselves. I begin with the Ewe translators. The Ewe language is spoken largely in both Ghana and Togo, but also in those parts of the world where one can find native Ewe speakers. It is taught today in the Ghana public schools, but rarely do Ghanaians have an opportunity to achieve great competence in the written form of the language. Schools texts are largely designed for the elementary grades, and even instruction at this level has varied over time as different Ghana governments have offered changing levels of support (or none at all) for local-language education. The availability of texts for a larger reading public has also varied over time. From the late nineteenth century through at least the 1960s, Ewe language publications were produced for a small but interested reading public. Since the 1970s, the increasing costs of production have undermined publishers’ abilities to produce affordable locallanguage materials for a relatively small Ewe reading public. One of the consequencesofthissituationisthatindividualswhoarespecificallytrainedinreading A Note on the Translations XII the language in both its historic and contemporary form are relatively rare. Those trained more specifically in the art of translation are even rarer. Thus, in seeking translatorsoftheEwetextspresentedhere,Ihavehadtorelyonindividualswhose mother tongue is the Ewe language but who have had varying degrees of experience with the study of the language and the translation process. The Aaron Kuku narrativewastranslatedbyKodjopaAttoh,anativeEwespeakerwhoisintimately familiar with the language as it is spoken in Ho and Kpando, but who is not a trained translator. In contrast, Paul Agbedor, who translated the Yosef Famfantor text, is both a native Ewe speaker and a professor of Ewe linguistics, specializing not in the theories and practice of translation, however, but in Ewe syntax, phonology, and semantics. Jasper Ackumey, who translated the Ewe-language passages in Paul Sands’s diary, is a researcher associated with the University of Ghana, with no specific language training although he is fluent in two of the major languages of southern Ghana, Twi and Ga, as well Ewe and is a native speaker of the Ewe dialect spoken by Sands. K. A Mensah, a high school teacher at the time he translated the oral interviews about Atorkor into English, is fully fluent in English and Ewe, but has also had no formal training in translation. All expressed confidence in their translations, not only because the texts are fairly prosaic, but also because they rarely relied solely on their own knowledge of the language. Virtually all consulted other Ewe speakers. They also relied on their understanding of the context in which the text was produced to help them deduce its meaning. They consulted D. Westermann’s 1928 Ewe-English dictionary, a text which has its own problems but which proved especially useful for finding the meanings...