Translating from English into Ekegusii in Radio Broadcasts: Presenters’ “Mistranslations” vs. Native Speakers’ Acceptability of Them

Abstract

This paper investigates the procedures which presenters on Egesa FM (a radio station broadcasting in Ekegusii) use to translate segments of news and advertisements from English into Ekegusii, a Bantu language of Kenya. One prevalent procedure they use is calque. For example, they translate the English phrase breaking news as amang’ana amayia buna agwateka, which literally means ‘words new now breaking’. This translation is quite unidiomatic in Ekegusii to the extent that combining the idea of gwateka (‘to break, i.e. to split something into two or more parts’) with that of amang’ana amayia (‘news’) is quite unnatural in Ekegusii, because for the speakers of this language (Abagusii), only something that is concrete and solid (though not necessarily strong) can break. Beyond sounding unnatural, some of such “mistranslations” are likely to sound offensive in relation to Ekegusii culture. The aim of the present paper is to analyse them with a view to drawing attention to the extent of the “cultural damage” they are likely to cause to an African mother tongue like Ekegusii. This damage arises from what the paper calls pragmatic implausibility and semantic inadequacy.