RP-Department of Kiswahili and African Languages

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Browsing RP-Department of Kiswahili and African Languages by Author "Ayieko, Gerry"

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    Translation of Kinship Terminology in Selected Bilingual Dictionaries in Kenya and Its Implication for Cross - Cultural Communication
    (Chemchemi International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2016) Wangia, Joyce I.; Ayieko, Gerry
    Kinship terms are culturally and socially tied to the society’s structure and communities’ values that have developed over a long period of time. In the different Kenyan social environments many kinship terms abound that are extremely definite and cannot be found in other Kenyan languages or English and consequently may generate some translation difficulties and misinterpretations. The intended meaning of these culturally bound kinship terms that exist in source languages which are embedded in the Kenyan socio-cultural scene cannot be transferred to the target language (English) through a word or group of words which are thought to be the English equivalents in the translation process. The paper presents a list of common kinship terms present in three Kenyan languages with comparable interpretation. Kinship terms that are mainly culture specific certainly indicates the firm and close social ties that a community has established over the years. The present paper seeks to answer two main questions: i) How are the non-equivalences of kinship terms between English and the selected languages translated in different bilingual dictionaries? ii) What is the alternative model of translating kinship terms in the selected bilingual dictionaries? These kinship terms pose difficulties and intercultural miscommunication when not properly interpreted. The present paper is based on Baker’s (2006) effected translation equivalence theory of Kinship terms and social structure model and equivalence theory of translation. The paper develops a model for translating kinship terms from the selected languages into English.