3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions

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    The politics and policies of language use in African Union institutions
    (2018) Tohouenou, Codjo Raymond
    Upon its inception in May 1963, the founding fathers of the then Organization of African Unity (OAU), now African Union (or AU), demonstrated a great deal of commitment towards the achievement of what should be called - as far as this study is concerned - the ‘African linguistic dream’. In this dream, the OAU founding fathers saw an African citizen who is empowered linguistically (UNESCO, 2006).1 Consequently, they were determined to ensure the development and promotion of indigenous African languages. The Experts Meeting held in Harare, Zimbabwe, in March 1997, therefore acknowledged that - in Africa - language policies should be informed by an African dream (UNESCO, 2006: 50)2. There have been several initiatives, policies, programmes, etc., to promote and develop indigenous African languages some of which are the 1986 Language Plan of Action for Africa3, the creation of the OAU Inter-African Bureau of Languages (OAU-BIL) which was later replaced by the ACALAN (Matsinhe, 2013, 2015), and recently the AU’s Agenda 20634. However, more than half a century after independence, indigenous African languages have still not been accorded their rightful place in public life, media, education and national affairs. The African linguistic dream is yet to materialise. Paradoxically, these languages are recognised as national and even official languages. Such designations are pointless because they are not supported by clear policies capable of guiding their implementation. To this extent, there has been a big contradiction between these talks and the actual linguistic reality on the ground (Chimhundu, 2015). In this study, a qualitative approach was used to investigate why the implementation of the OAU/AU’s Language Plans of Action for Africa (LPAAs) has not led to an effective promotion of the language agenda. Qualitative methods such as purposive sampling, convenience sampling as well as snowball sampling strategies were used to gather views of language experts, language policy makers and implementers and politicians, and linguistic experts, some of whom have contributed to the drafting of the LPAAs. Twenty semi-structured individual interviews and two group interviews were conducted. Each of which was made up of 11 and 8participants, i.e., n=19, making a total of 39 participants. The interviews were all in English, and they were transcribed directly without being translated from or into any other language. A thematic analysis was then applied to the transcripts using the Framework Method. The study confirms that the implementation of the LPAAs has not contributed substantianly to the development and promotion of the effective use of indigenous African languages as there has been a significant shift from the OAU-BIL’s militant approach of eradication of the use of colonial languages, given the fact that it opposed the use of colonial languages from the onset in 1963, to a much softer stance since ACALAN - the Specialised Organ of the OAU/AU responsible for developing and promoting indigenous African languages - now calls for a partnership between African languages and colonial languages (African Union, 2015; Batibo 2015; Matsinhe, 2013: 27). Africa does not need to waste its precious time and resources on developing and promoting effective use of indigenous African languages because both LPAAs are still pertinent, topical and remain a reference (Chimhundu, 2015).
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    Court interpreting in Zimbabwe: a descriptive study of consecutively-interpreted rape trials in regional magistrates’ courts
    (2017) Svongoro, Paul Revai
    This is a linguistic investigation of English and Shona consecutively-interpreted rape trials heard in selected Regional Magistrates’ courts in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean magistrates’ courts can be regarded as a special context because, in most trials, the court officials in an English-medium trial also speak the language(s) of the accused/witness, although they conduct the trial in the language of the court, i.e. English. In such a unique context, the interpreter is not the only bilingual participant. This is unlike many other bilingual settings where court officials do not speak the language of the accused/witness. Specifically, the study investigates the contention between, on the one hand, the impression of the role of the interpreter as a translating device, reflected in court interpreters’ guidelines in Zimbabwe and, on the other hand, the reality of the interpreting situation. Focusing on the effect of additions and omissions on source language utterances, the study employs an interdisciplinary approach which draws from interpreting studies approaches, discourse analytic approaches and corpus-based interpreting studies to investigate interpreted courtroom discourse. The main source of data is question/answer transcripts of consecutively-interpreted rape trials heard at two regional magistrates’ courts in Zimbabwe, making the study principally linguistic although it employs aspects of ethnography. Data from transcripts were supplemented by 92 hours of observation of open court proceedings and structured and semi-structured interviews with court interpreters, magistrates and public prosecutors. The findings presented in this study reveal that, because court interpreters are mindful that their primary goal is to ensure that participants fully understand each other’s communicative intentions, they adopt a strategy for conveying renditions which would ensure that a speaker’s communicative motive, and not only his/her actual words, is available to an end receipient. The resultant interpreted discourse thus reveals some additions and omissions which may impact on the propositional content and style of the source language message. It is possible to argue that the interpreters included these elements based on their intuitive reasoning. The study therefore argues that the presence of additions and omissions in the interpreters’ renditions could be explained in terms of court interpreters’ awareness of the importance of pragmatics and context. In this way, the interpreters’ renditions, as confirmed by my findings, support the expectation that court interpreters are always mindful of the need to convey the speakers’ meaning in full. The study therefore makes a special contribution, from an African point of view, to the debate on interpreters’ role perception by advocating a move towards a more holistic account of dialogue interpreting encounters in which all features are taken into account so that the interpreter’s role is better appreciated. The recommendations the study makes on how various stakeholders can work with interpreters will ultimately enhance the quality of interpreting service provision to ensure that the rights of the people for whom they interpret are safeguarded. Although the findings of this study are based on data from Zimbabwean courtrooms, many of the issues raised in this study would be of interest to other interpreter-mediated courtrooms.
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