Browsing by Author "Saliwa, Ncebakazi Faith"
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- ItemA qualitative analysis of government documents translated into Isixhosa(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2006-03) Saliwa, Ncebakazi Faith; Feinauer, A. E.; Jadezweni, M. W.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Afrikaans and Dutch.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South Africa declared all 11 South African languages official to bring back dignity to all citizens of this country and to ensure that communication reaches all people in the language of their choice. In an effort to meet this constitutional mandate, government institutions are obliged to translate documents into all official national or provincial languages. Before 1998, only two languages were used in official documentation -and those were English and Afrikaans. That meant that a lot of money was invested in and committed into developing these two languages, especially Afrikaans, so that they could be used readily in all official and general communication. African languages were not developed as much then and this became a problem when they were declared official as they were not ready to meet the challenges of official and technical use. Government has not been able to identify this as a problem and has therefore lightly and ignorantly regarded tasks such as translation as easy tasks that can be handled by any speaker of the language concerned. This has resulted in very poor translations. This study begins with an introduction that entails the hyphothesis. According to the hyphothesis, most government documents translated into isiXhosa do not communicate with their target audiences because of their poor quality. This makes it difficult for target readers to follow the message. The poor quality results from the use of either untrained translators or people who claim that they can translate -as well as the use of any language speaker to translate by the virtue of being able to speak the language concerned. In other instances, the issue is not the quality but rather transliteration because of the use of language professionals such as lecturers who are conversant with the language and grammar, but who have no expertise, training or experience in translation. Chapter 2 explores the three main approaches of translation, namely the linguistic approach, the text-linguistic approach and the functional approach. In this chapter, the results of extensive research and development over the years in the translation field are presented. In Chapter 3, two government documents are analysed by the researcher and by a group of participants who were given relevant questionnaires and others interviewed. In Chapter 4, the reasons for poor quality are identified and, in Chapters 5 and 6, solutions to problems and reasons for poor translation are suggested. It is hoped that the research will stimulate a new subject for discussion and a field of study concerning translation into African languages so that government can seriously regard translation as a specialist field.