CONTEXT AND COGNITION IN THE TRANSLATION OF GEORGE ORWELL’S ANIMAL FARM TO KISWAHILI

Abstract

The translation of Animal Farm from English to Kiswahili was examined in this study in terms of context and cognition. The study aimed at highlighting how non-equivalence may be viewed as a key strategy in translation and to offer insights on how contextual frames of reference can be employed in literary translation. By assuming that readers required the least amount of processing effort to comprehend a text, it intended to determine if the target language version was relevant to the readers. For a book to be considered relevant, the reader must be able to relate to it in their current contextual understanding. The translator might do this by selecting the best translation technique; by using either equivalence or nonequivalence translation procedures. The objectives of the study were to: establish the cognitive contextual frames of reference in the English to Kiswahili translation of Animal Farm; identify domestication as cognition in this translation and assess the degree of cognitive contextual meaning loss or gain in the target language version after translation. The source text "Animal Farm" and the target text "Shamba la Wanyama" provided data for the study. In order to examine the nonequivalence of the words and phrases of the two texts, a qualitative analysis was done. The study sampled non-equivalent words and sentences using a systematic sampling approach. To get reliable and accurate conclusions from the text, the study also employed content analysis. The relevance hypothesis by Wilson & Sperber, (1995), was used. According to this theory, every statement contains information that is pertinent enough to be worth the time of the addressee to process. It utilized several components of the relevance theory, including the idea that the cognitive environment of a person is a collection of facts that are observable to them and that a text was only relevant when processed within the context of preexisting assumptions produced a favorable cognitive outcome. New advancements have also been made in the idea of relevance that the study used. For instance, certain specific content phrases will continue to be active while being irrelevant in their context, according to Rubio, (2005). Sixty nonequivalent words and phrases were selected using systematic sampling technique, where meanings were deduced from sentences as well as words and phrases. The sociocultural, organizational, textual, and communicational category changes were all utilized by the translator, with the communicational category shifts serving as the highest contextual frames of reference of the study. Due to the cultural differences, it was found that the translator chose to heavily edit the source material in order to communicate. To preserve the original meaning of the source material, the translator chose a number of translation techniques. These included translation by omission, translation by a term that is more general, translation by a word that is similar, and translation by example. Translation by cultural equivalents, translation by a more generic word, translation by a less expressive word, translation by paraphrase, adaptation, and idiomatic translation are some of the domestication tactics that were utilized in the study. The most prevalent domestication technique employed in the translation was paraphrasing with a related term. It was also concluded that meaning loss occurred more frequently in translation than gain, mostly as a result of paraphrasing translation using unrelated terms. The research will shed light on the application of contextual frames of reference in literary translation.