Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Cultural Theory and Its Significance in Translation

Lee, Hyoseok

doi:10.21049/ccs.2017.46..411

With emphasis on various local cultures to confront the Western central culture, Ngugi wa Thiong'o proposes them 'to move horizontally' so as not to repeat the oppressive culture of the West. We need not only dialogues between dominant languages and peripheral languages, but also between marginal languages. With respect to this point, Ngugi thinks that translation itself could be very effective. Ngugi wants to stimulate writing and speaking in marginalized languages and promote translation as a means of making these languages visible. He regards translation as a conversational tool among languages and cultures in the multicultural global community. As is already well known, his determination to write his later works only in his native Gikuyu language has a great meaning in his anti-colonial as well as anti-neocolonial movement. Its proof is his recent effort to cooperate with Jalada Africa. Simon Gikandi criticized the English translation of Matigari as a denial of cultural hegemony of Gikuyu language and its subordination to the global cultural market. However, the concept of 'thick translation', helps us move from Gikandi's doubt of the 'epistemology of translation' to a meaningful strategy of postcolonial translation. Facing some of the scholars' doubts related to his over-stressing language problem, Ngugi points out that the world has managed to function well through translation: the possibility of translation between cultures and translation as a mediating tool for communication nationally as well as internationally. Based on this two-sided solution of translation, he believes that we can overcome the opposition between relativity and universality, center and periphery, and the dominant and the subordinate.

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