Translation practices in a developmental context: An exploration of public health communication in Zambia

Putting meaning back into development; or (semio)translating development

“…Furthermore, literature on how societies develop from the (multimodal) semiosic interactions between people is emerging from fields like philosophy (Searle 1995;, anthropology (Deacon 2013;Parmentier 2016), sociology (Latour 2007;Luhmann 1995) and development studies (Pieterse 2010) and challenging the linguistic bias that is inherent in translation studies. Chibamba's (2018) and Ajayi's (2018) recent doctoral theses further argue for an intersemiotic correction in translation studies, and this position is supported by my own work (Marais 2017;Marais & Kull 2016). These arguments raise a number of questions: Why does interlingual translation not suffice, and if it does not suffice, how should one conceptualise translation?…”

“…Rather, they spend their efforts on intersemiotic translations such as translating messages into song or into animations (Chibamba 2018). If one supported the maintenance of minority languages, one could bemoan the lack of translation, but my aim in this paper is neither to prescribe nor to evaluate translation practices for their maintenance of minority languages or multilingualism.…”

“…The paper combines Peircean semiotics and complexity thinking in order to explore the parameters of a theory of development from an intersemiotic translation perspective. Chibamba (2018) argues that the nature of translation practice in Zambia is such that relatively little interlingual translation takes place. Rather, much more emphasis is placed on forms of what is generally called 'intersemiotic' translation.…”