Broken Translations

I’m doing some research out in Ghana right now. I’m loving and resenting the heat in equal measures and, of course, I’m constantly amused to be back in the place where almost all the languages I ‘respond to’ come into play. The amusement comes mainly because in my first few days back I’m hypersensitive to tones, inflections, cadences and the odd twists of translations.

OK, maybe I’m moving a bit fast; to give context, having been formed by colonial whim rather than with respect to pre-existing sovereignties, Ghana has more languages than you can count on your fingers – so the language of officialdom is English. The result of this is that our Englishes are the result of myriad permutations of textbook English via the filter of the native tongues of Ghana. The trouble is that many of the languages are tonal and some of the early translations done by missionaries who had transcribed what they heard spoken do not take this into account. For me, the most amusing results are the names Father and Mother. I was walking down the main Kaneshie – Abeka road when I heard a young boy calling out Mother; I was struck my the archaic nature of the call, given that most people just say Ma or Mmaa so I looked back and was stunned to see little girl (maybe 6 years-old) running out. Actually, I shouldn’t say stunned because two things happened – one was that I remembered that I once knew a boy called Father, but I had always assumed it was a nickname; two was that it suddenly hit me that the name was a translation, a broken translation. In Twi, for instance, it is not uncommon to find a girl named Maame, although – tonally – it is quite different from its homonym Maame, which means mother. However, a translator not sensitive to the difference could easily translate the name Maame as the label/role Maame and in trying to anglicise their children’s names for school a few trusting denizens may have baptised the children Mother and Father.

Of course, all this is speculation; what I really thought about after the incident and the theorising that followed, was England and the many languages that now form part its linguistic heritage. I’m excited by the possibilities of the cross-pollination of these tongues, moulded within the cultural context of brick houses and right-hand-drives, and what they will add to storytelling and entertainment. We’ve already seen some of that happening in the live comedy and in music, but I think that the upcoming generation are the ones that will really revolutionise what has already been happening in little imperceptible ways. In my work in schools, I often find that kids don’t even consider words like kebab, pizza and verandah to be of non-English origin – they own them. They think they don’t know any ‘foreign’ words and yet they use them everyday; I believe it is this lack of self-consciousness in the engagement with what is imported that will power a true revolution – in reading, writing and our overall engagement with the world.

I’m not suggesting that it’s going to be easy; there are editors out there, still, just waiting to weed out any words that seem ‘foreign’ without ever giving readers the chance to discover them, but soon those editors will be of a different ilk and the stories will reach us, pure and impure – slowly but surely, to quote Sam Cooke, ‘A Change is Gonna Come.’ Yes it is.