“To See Their Mother Tongues In Text”: The Transformative Power of Translation
On a continent where "multilingual” means not two or three languages, but thousands, years of working in literature have given Munyao Kilolo a unique perspective on the power of translation.
In addition to being the founder and editor-in-chief of the Ituika Literary Platform and director of the Mabati Cornell Kiswahili Prize, Kilolo is the former managing editor of the magazine Jalada Africa[1]. Its Translation Issue revolutionized ideas about what translation could mean in the literary spheres of Africa by translating a story originally written in Gikuyu into over 100 different languages.
Kilolo spent two days with the class English 290S: “Small Magazines in Africa and the Diaspora”, where we explore the themes and styles found within small publications throughout the African diaspora. As we examined Jalada and learned about literary translation, Kilolo’s expertise helped us explore the possibilities of translation in chronicling the African diaspora. He also sat down for an interview about his experience with Jalada and Ituika, as well as what he’s learned from decades of working in African literary spheres.
Jalada’s Translation issue started with a simple premise: publish one story in an African language and translate it into as many other languages as possible. The chosen author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was selected for his prominence as well as his history of advocacy for writing and translating in African languages. Ngũgĩ wrote his story, “The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright” in Gikuyu, and also supplied the very first translation into English.
“We requested him to actually do the English translation because it was important to... have an authoritative English translation from which other people can connect to the story,” Kilolo said.
With the story chosen and having undergone its first translation, the next step was to seek out as many translators as possible.
“We did not have a formal call out for translators to submit translations, so I started with my friends, and then, you know, people I knew in the writing community... and so for the first three or four months we heard the story translated into 33 different languages,” recounted Kilolo. Little did he know that 33 was just the beginning; eventually, the story would be published in over 100 different languages.
Translating may seem like a simple process, but as Kilolo explained, its history in the African diaspora is much more complicated.
“For the Jalada translation project, it was very important to start with an African language and then move to other African languages... Prior to that, a lot of the translation projects I would see were always mostly either from or to European languages,” Kilolo said. In a post-colonial Africa dominated by colonial “linguistic zones”, it was often assumed that ideas must pass through a European language to be understood by multiple African languages, but Jalada wanted to subvert that idea. “The hope is that with time, we develop translational mechanisms that allow for us to have contact between African languages through the lingua franca, such as Kiswahili,” said Kilolo.
Kilolo, who himself speaks Kamba, Kiswahilii, English, and Sheng, grew up in Kenya, where multilingualism shapes everything within the education system. With Kiswahili as the lingua franca, English as the language of internationalism, Sheng emerging from multilingual slang, and many mother tongues being spoken at home, Kilolo poses that the ways that Kenyans inhabit and work with language are different from many other parts of the world.
“There is a multi-directional flow of the languages and how people experience the languages -- how they write and how they translate -- and that is exactly one of the things we wanted to capture,” Kilolo said.
The power and meaning found in translating between lesser recognized African languages were felt most poignantly in individual reactions to the Jalada Translation issue. When the issue was first published digitally, Kilolo said, “We had people respond to them live through Twitter, Facebook posts, and they were just, like, so excited to see their mother tongues in... text, because a lot of people do not get a chance to see text in their mother tongues.”
As a digital publication, the Jalada Translation edition owes much of its reach and popularity to the Internet, from digital publishing to online forums like Twitter and Facebook that created a space for community engagement about the work. “The power of the Internet to connect people is amazing, and we wanted to use that as a tool to show that our African languages can really reach as many people as possible,” Kilolo said.
However, digital landscapes are being increasingly transformed by the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. Many may worry about AI leading to the obsolescence of literature, but Kilolo’s concerns are very different.
“The way the AI machine language learning platforms are trained is on what is available, and sometimes the African languages don't have a lot of materials on the Internet where to train...these chatbots," Kilolo remarked on the linguistic inequities of AI growth. “There's also the risk of some languages becoming privileged again and then others getting lost, just the way it happened with other forms of colonialism.”
For Kilolo, the most important legacy of the Jalada Translation issue will be seen in its encouragement of Africans to contribute and collaborate with literature in non-traditional languages.
“Every language is important, and every language can be used as a tool of literary production... so when we have a translation project like the Jalada translation project, we are showing that those languages can be in conversation and that they can be a way to unite people as opposed to bring[ing] them apart,” Kilolo said. “The idea is to enrich African languages by doing more work in them, by having more work written in them, but also using them as the tools to enable conversation and translation.”
Thank you to Munyao Kilolo for taking the time to teach and inspire us!
