Next, the study takes up the context of situation of the novel, both internal and external. For the context of culture, the dissertation draws from Maria Tymoczko’s holistic approach to cultural translation (2010) to deal with questions of genre, intertextuality and discourse, and culturally-marked signature concepts. The most salient feature of this book is that it is written in what the author himself defined as “‘rotten English’, a mixture of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English and occasional flashes of good, even idiomatic English.” After the initial theoretical considerations, the dissertation performs a thorough stylistic analysis of the source-text taking as a general framework the structure put forward by Discourse Analysis (Munday and Zhang 2015 Baumgarten and Schröter 2018), but combining it freely with insights from other scholars. However, any discussion of cultural translation willing to avoid uniformization and assimilation should be grounded on a specific project, which in our case is the eventual translation into Spanish of Sozaboy, a novel written by the late Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995). The dissertation begins by establishing a dialogue with the existing literature on translation and postcolonialism, trying to ascertain what constitutes translator responsibility when working with postcolonial contexts, and how can translation be mobilized for counter-hegemonic purposes today, exploring the notion of translation as a means to enact a new universalism based on difference (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000 Santos 2004 Balibar 2004, 1995 Ngugi 1987, 2009). The overall aim of this dissertation is to explore strategies for the translation of postcolonial texts into a “third” language, that is, a language other than the colonized vernacular and the European language of the colonizer, and to do so from a responsible position as a translator.
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