Original Research Article

The Role of Cultural Convergence in Quality Assessment of Community Translation in a Bilingual Setup: The Case of Cameroon

Khunju Njinju Christopher

Researcher Fellow in Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies, Advanced School of Translators and Interpreters, University of Buea Cameroon

E-mail: khunjuchris@gmail.com

Received: 21August 2022  I  Accepted: 24 September 2022  I  Published: 29 September 2022  I  Article ID: MRJER22022
Copyright © 2022 Author(s) retain the copyright of this article.
This article is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0.

Abstract

As a bilingual country (French and English), official information is systematically translated into any of the two languages to facilitate communication between the French and English-speaking Cameroonians. This translation is visible in newspapers, media houses, churches, law courts, billboards, signposts, and banners. This paper argues that the quality of some of these translations leaves much to be desired, especially the handling of cultural elements, which remains uncultured mainly. The paper hypothesizes the coexistence between French and English in Cameroon leads to the easy and inadvertent use of deceptive cognates in translation, side-lining the cultural equivalence technique. Using translated texts sourced from newspapers and posted information in French and English across Cameroon, data was collected and analysed in a grid. The objective was to popularise the study of Community Translation, thereby improving quality and contributing to nation-building. Using the cultural translation theory, this paper reveals that one of the causes of such uncultured translation within Community Translation in Cameroon is the cultural convergence trend. For this problem to be elucidated in a bilingual setup like Cameroon, the symbiosis between language acquisition and communication should be a reality. Otherwise, acquiring a language and not communicating and writing it amounts to dealing with a dead language. In translation, it is essential to boost the cultural awareness of the would-be translator by allowing the trainee to stay with native language speakers for about six months. During this stay, they would acquire through immersion all the cultural subtleties of a language to be able to speak, write and even translate most or all the cultural elements inherent in that language.

Keywords: Community Translation, Cultural convergence, Culture, Unculturedness