Nicodème Niyongabo

The politics of self-translation: Multilingualism in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow and Devil on the Cross

Sociolinguistic studies of emerging indigenized varieties of English have emphasized the influence of “inner circle” English (in the U.S. and U.K.) on the development of English in the “outer circle.” However, the influence of “World Englishes” on translation has received little attention. Our project investigates the East African variety of English that blends lexical elements of Kiswahili in Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s self-translated novels Devil on the Cross (1982) and Wizard of the Crow (2006). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s work as an essayist, novelist, playwright, activist and commentator places African indigenous languages and culture in the centre and stresses issues of multilingualism and power relations between English, Kikuyu and Kiswahili. Our study of the translations reveals that both the Kikuyu source texts (T1) and their counterpart English versions (T2) sketch the English-Kiswahili-Mother tongue triple configuration underlying regional language policies. This poster will present the corpus of our project, our tentative research questions, our research methodologies, and some preliminary findings.

Nicodème Niyongabo has been a Canadian resident since 2010. He holds a Post-Masters of Literary Studies and a Masters of Western Literature from KU Leuven in Belgium. His PhD project titled “The Politics of Self-Translation: Multilingualism in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Self-translated Novels” seeks to quantitatively assess the author’s use of three languages (English, Kiswahili and Kikuyu) in each version of the selected texts. Nicodème has worked as a language assistant for the United Nations Operation in Burundi (ONUB) and a teaching assistant at the University of Burundi over the past decade. His research and teaching interests include translation theory and practice, language policy and planning, postcolonial studies, comparative and world literature, oral literature of the African continent, and ecocriticism.