Maus tradutores e bons intérpretes: ficcionalizações da manipulação da tradução nas literaturas africanas de língua portuguesa
Palavras-chave:
translation manipulation; decoloniality; epistemic resistance; African literaturesResumo
This article presents some exemplary cases of fictional translators and translation situations in Portuguese-Language African Literatures, drawn from José Eduardo Agualusa, João Melo, Mia Couto and João Paulo Borges Coelho’s works. Given the scarcity of representations regarding the literary translator, we resorted to situations of interlingual interpretation involving two unevenly
positioned linguistic codes. As we found out, every case contained a deliberate manipulation of the translated message, in order for the translator to gain some personal/community advantage. The victims of this manipulation are mostly foreigners endowed with a high cultural/linguistic status. We aim to show that these conscious manipulations can be seen as an attitude of decolonial resistance against the Modernity/Coloniality nexus, represented by global foreigners: the subaltern (the African) empowers themselves as translators, as arbiters between two linguistic codes, and in so doing subvert the order of things.