This collection serves as a showcase for literary translation research with a focus on African perspectives, highlighting theoretical and methodological developments in the discipline while shedding further light on the literary landscape in Africa.

The book offers a framework for understanding key approaches and topics in literary translation situated in the African context, covering foundational concepts as well as new directions within the field. The first half of the volume focuses on the translation product, exploring such topics as translation strategies, literary genres, and self-translation, while the second half examines process and reception, allowing for an in-depth look at agency, habitus, and ethics. Each chapter is structured to allow for the introduction of a given theoretical aspect of literary translation followed by a summary of a completed research project with an African focus showing theory in practice, offering a model for readers to build their own literary translation research projects while also underscoring the range of perspectives and unique challenges to literary translation work in Africa.

This unique volume is a key resource for students and scholars in translation studies, giving visibility to African perspectives on literary translation while pointing the way forward for future research directions.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Methodological and sociohistorical overview

1 Translating Africa

Paul Bandia

2 The ethical in literary translation

Libby Meintjes

3 Broadening latitudes: mapping a sociological history of literary translation into Swahili

Serena Talento

Part 2: Product-oriented literary translation

4 Crossing continents: a critical discourse analytical study of the translation of South African Young Adult texts into French and German

Judith Inggs

5 The translation of diasporic African Indian autobiographical voices into the languages of Spain: Achmat Dangor (1948–) and Moyez G. Vassanji (1950–)

Juan Zarandona

6 Mapping culture in literary translation

Ella Wehrmeyer

7 Self-translation of an Afrikaans short story by SJ Naudé

Eleanor Cornelius and George de Bruin

8 Translating emotion conceptual metaphors: a case of Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom in isiXhosa

Amanda Nokele

9 Translating linguistic hybridity and indigenous words in Mia Couto’s novel A varanda do frangipani

Celina Cachucho

10 Proverb translation to the realm of the story in Chinua Achebe’s novels

Amechi Akwanya

Part 3: Reception and process studies

11 Translating the neighbour: contemporary Maghrebi literature in Spain

Mònica Rius-Piniés

12 Women as protagonists in West African plays translated in Cuba

Ròcio Anguiano Pérez

13 Who’s the boss? Power relations between agents in the literary translation process

Ilse Feinauer and Amanda Lourens

14 Translating Une Vie de Boy: a Bourdieusian study of agency in literary translation

Felix Awung

Conclusion

15 A curriculum for literary translation in a multilingual South African classroom

Christopher Fotheringham