Verification of Swahili-English Novel Translation Problems: A Case of Ben Mtobwa’s Dar es Salaam By Night

Joseph, Paul (2019) Verification of Swahili-English Novel Translation Problems: A Case of Ben Mtobwa’s Dar es Salaam By Night. Masters thesis, The Open University of Tanzania.

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Abstract

This study was meant to verify Swahili-English novel translation anomalies with reference to Ben Mtobwa’s Dar es Salaam By Night as translated from the original Swahili version Dar es Salaam Usiku. Both the Source Language Text (SLT) and Target Language Text (TLT) were read carefully and then a comparative qualitative design was employed to draw from the TLT some extracts which appeared in the mind of the researcher to be exhibiting some kind of translation anomalies of Undertranslation, Over-translation and Mistranslation. After drawing anomalous extracts from the TLT that were compared against the SLT extracts, the researcher prepared a questionnaire that was designed to identify the type of translation anomaly for each of the 33 extracts as well as the possible cause for such a problem. A Focus Group Discussion was also conducted to get more views about the cause for anomaly in the identified extracts.The findings revealed that the respondents had judged all the identified extracts as anomalous, the chief cause of such a problem being aesthetic value. In many cases, the translator played down very important literary devices and rhetorical figures that were used in the SLT for a particular artistic effect the result of which was that the TLT lacked some artistic flavour that are common in the SLT. The other reason for such problems was ‘linguistic aspect’ in which the translator seemed to use wrong equivalents in some cases making the TLT lose validity. Thus, the study concludes that Dar es Salaam By Night lacks artistic flavour because of translation anomalies. The translator should therefore be well informed of the elements of literature before embarking on a literary translation.

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