Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom: the isiXhosa translator's tall order

Abstract

The paper aims to show how the translator coped with transmitting the message to the new target audience bearing in mind Hilaire Belloc's six general rules for the translator of a prose text, as reflected in Bassnett-McGuire (1988: 116-117) which could be summarised as "translating the sense of the original, translating idiom by idiom, intention by intention, avoiding false friends, aiming at the resurrection of an alien thing in a native body, and not to be embellish". These and many other principles will form the general background against which the current translation will be viewed. It should be stressed, from the outset, that the primary aim of the exercise was to highlight the various problems encountered in the search for equivalence of adequacy, not to evaluate the translation as such.


(S/ern Af Linguistics & Applied Language Stud: 2003 21(3): 141-152)