Translation, Stylistics and the Imperativeness of Transliteration in African Literary Translation

Abstract

This paper explores the notion of translation and the discipline of stylistics as well as their interdisciplinary significance with a view to suggesting an approach to translating cultural elements in African literary texts into foreign languages such as French and English. The work asserts that African stylistic investigation in translation unearths both the what and how of a target text‘s structure and evaluates the dichotomy between linguistic representations that reflect the message of a culturally infused African text in its translation. To this end, stylistic translation critics are enjoined to evaluate African experiences and ethno-linguistic figures in translation by means of literal approaches like transliteration.