“Lost in translation” is not just a cute phrase; it
sums up the very real challenges and pitfalls of rendering words and thoughts
into another language from the original. This is of even greater concern when
the subject deals with war and witnesses’ testimony, not to mention literature.
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| Archive Manager Claver Irakoze speaks at the workshop. |
Addressing such issues, Ireland’s University College Cork (UCC) hosted a two-day workshop titled "Translation and Activism" in late September,
which had the stated aim of “building a network around activist translation”.
The invited participants included educators, writers and leading figures in translation
studies, while the main discussion focused on “translating memory” in the archiving
of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Survivors as well as perpetrators of the massacres
have been telling their stories to archivists since the Kigali Genocide
Memorial was established by the Aegis Trust in 2004. Most speak in Kinyarwanda –
Rwanda’s official language – and their words are subsequently translated into English and French. But do aspects of their stories get lost in translation?
“This conference, and my interest in activist
translation more generally, arose from my research on Rwandan genocide
testimonies which brought to the fore a paradox at the heart of the translation
process,” says Dr. Caroline Williamson, a member of UCC’s Department of French
who organized the meeting.
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| Dr. Caroline Williamson and Paul Rukesha |
“On the one hand, this crucial activity can provide
visibility and engagement to the otherwise obscured and disenfranchised. On the
other hand, it is a process rife with potential pitfalls and dissatisfactions,”
she added.
She told SWAN that in applying for the Irish Research
Council funding that covered the workshop, she posed the following question: “When
translating texts that could be perceived as (culturally or politically)
controversial or unpalatable to a Western readership, how do translators balance
the need to remain faithful to their source material while maintaining
international interest or indeed commercial viability?”
The overall aim of the workshop, she continued, “was
to bring together translation specialists as well as archivists, ethnographers,
and journalists to discuss this question and establish the terms and parameters
of a critical and overdue debate about the role of translation in political and
social activism.”
Archivists Claver Irakoze and Paul Rukesha –
representing the Aegis Trust, a UK-based organization that works to prevent
genocide – travelled to Ireland from Rwanda to participate in the workshop and to
discuss their experiences.
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| Claver Irakoze and Paul Rukesha present information about the Genocide Archive of Rwanda. |
As the Kigali Genocide Memorial housing the Archive receives
more than 70,000 international visitors a year, it’s essential that these visitors
are able to read and view testimony in languages other than the local Kinyarwanda, the
archivists said.
“Translation is important because we bring to the
audience everything that is related to the roots of the genocide, its
consequences, and the resilience of the Rwandan people,” said Rukesha, who
supervises translating, transcribing and subtitling at the Archive.
“The genocide is not a particularity of any people. It’s
a human tragedy that concerns everyone,” he told SWAN. “Most of the survivors speak in Kinyarwanda,
and when you speak in your own language, you can express things that you can’t
in an adopted language. That’s why accurate translation is so important.”
This view was supported when Rukesha and Irakoze
screened a short film at the workshop, showing survivors speaking about family
members who had been murdered and about the horrors they had witnessed in the
100 days of killings in 1994 that took the lives of more than 800,000 people.
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| The cover of Hatzfeld's book, in English translation. |
The film, with subtitles in English, brought the
tragedy of the genocide to the seminar participants, many of whom were visibly moved. It also underscored Rwanda’s work to achieve healing in a place
where “perpetrators and survivors share the same country”, as Archive manager
Irakoze said.
In other discussions of Rwanda, doctoral candidate
Maja Haals Londorf examined the work of translators in ethnographic fieldwork
with children after the genocide, and lecturer Anneleen Spiessens of Ghent
University (Belgium) discussed the “fiction of an ‘innocent’ translation” in
the work of French writer Jean Hatzfeld.
Author of Une Saison de machetes (Machete Season: The
Killers in Rwanda Speak), Hatzfeld interviewed ten men who participated in the
killings, and he presented their “extraordinary” testimony in this book and
other reports. But scholars say he gave too little attention to the role of the
interpreter during the interviews, raising questions about what might have been
said or not said in the original language.
Further exploring the role of translation (or a lack of it in this case), Professor Hilary
Footitt of Reading University, England, focused on non-governmental organizations
such as Oxfam, who may not be doing enough to rectify the dearth of documents
in local languages.
In Footitt’s paper “Translating Development”, she outlined
the history of translation at the anti-poverty charitable organization,
concluding that there is an “overwhelming Euro-centricity of language” in the
international development field.
“NGOs always say that they listen to people … that
they’re empowering people by listening to them,” Footitt told SWAN. “But it’s
very difficult to hear people when you’re talking to them in your own language.
There’s an Anglophone blindness in the development world.”
For more information
on the Genocide Archive of Rwanda (in English), see: http://www.genocidearchiverwanda.org.rw/index.php
(Note: SWAN's editor attended the workshop, discussing literature in translation.)
(Note: SWAN's editor attended the workshop, discussing literature in translation.)
