Translation as a bridge across languages and cultures

The case of French and Igbo

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of translation in bridging barriers, notably linguistic, cultural, economic, social and diplomatic among nations as well as in globalization. The objective of the paper is to examine some aspects of French and Igbo languages and cultures which translation has made possible. To achieve this, data are collected/drawn from different aspects of the two languages and cultures such as: idioms/proverbs, gastronomy/food, clothing/dressing and social activities. French is one of the Indo-European languages spoken in the metropolitan France and other Francophone countries around the world while Igbo is an African language of the Niger-Congo family spoken in Nigeria by the Igbo-speaking race and it is one of the three major Nigerian languages. The choice of the two languages is to show the translatability of human languages despite their genetic and typological differences. The exercise reveals that the two languages though different in many respects are mutually intelligible through translation as evidenced in our work and some others before it such as the translation of Chinua Achebe’s "Things Fall Apart" (a compendium of Igbo culture) from English to French. The importance of translation in globalization as an agent of human development and a bridge across cultures and languages is made evident in this article through examples drawn from the two languages and cultures.