Information repackaging: Investigating translation strategies of Nollywood movie titles in Kiswahili

Abstract

Many Nollywod movies have found their way into the Kiswahili film industry. To own the movies and make them easily absorbed into the local movie markets in Kiswahili-speaking communities, the movies usually require one of two translation strategies: voiceover /dubbing or subtitling. This study seeks to investigate the various translation strategies used in translating Nollywood movie titles into Kiswahili for the purposes of information repackaging. For this study, fifty (50) Nollywood movie titles translated into Kiswahili were analyzed through a purposive sampling method where each title was reviewed. The films collected from 2019-2021 were purposely sampled with dubbing or voiceovers as the central premise for their selection. The equivalence theory propounded by Nida (1964) was used to guide this study, positing that there is ordinarily no full equivalence between code units or two languages. To this end, titling as an art of translation is expected to render the messages of a source text with minimal variations. Juxtaposing the Nollywood movie titles to those of their Kiswahili equivalents, the research found that translation ellipses, translation transference- borrowing, codeswitching, literal translations, insertion and paraphrasing were the most commonly used strategies for the titles. This could be attributed to the variations between Kiswahili and English, as well as the fact that movie titling (as far as this study is concerned) does not have any strict rules regarding word limit. Furthermore, the new titles were found to be more straightforward and catchy and depict the storyline of the movie. It is also evident from the study that the translators lacked the requisite skills for effective translation. The study argues that the connection between translation strategies of Nollywood movie titles and their adaptation in Kiswahili is for the purposes of information repackaging.