Nollywood and indigenous language translation flows

Abstract

Africa’s multiplicity of languages has seen little manifestation in large-scale translation flows of the indigenous African languages in the post-independence period, largely because of the hegemony of ex-colonial languages. Against this background, Nollywood’s stimulation of translation from and into indigenous African languages in a way that crosses national borders and exhibits some “velocity” is exceptional. This chapter investigates Nollywood’s relationship with indigenous language translation and accounts for the conditions that promote indigenous language use in inter-societal information flows. The investigation employs the concepts of selective mediation and permeability as described in Sergey Tyulenev’s application of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory to explore how Nollywood-stimulated indigenous language translations can pierce through language barriers, while operating selectively under the influence of social and ideological conditioning.