MARKS OF ETHNICITY IN PURPLE HIBISCUS TRANSLATION

• Main Author: Fernanda de Oliveira Müller
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade de Brasília 2016-10-01
• Series: Belas Infiéis
• Subjects: Ethnicity; Purple Hibiscus; Chimamanda Adichie; Antoine Berman
• Online Access: http://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/belasinfieis/article/view/21480/15344

This study gives an analysis of the English – Brazilian Portuguese translation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel, Purple Hibiscus, made by Julia Romeu. It is an attempt to analyze how traces of ethnic identities marked in the source text are reproduced in the Brazilian version Hibisco Roxo, published in 2011. Initially, is a brief biography of the writer is presented together with her history towards the construction of a new paradigm for the literature about Africa and Nigeria. Adichie challenges Western stereotypes about that continent, which tend to report poverty, war and disease scenarios. Secondly, a summary of the story was made and the main characters were described. Thirdly, a collection of recorded words and phrases in the Igbo language was compiled from the original text and an analysis of the translation of those terms into Brazilian Portuguese was performed. Afterwards, the concept of ethnicity described by the sociologist Anthony Giddens was presented. Based on that concept, it was concluded that the terms previously selected could be considered as marks of ethnicity, reflecting the presence of the Igbo ethnic group in the British colonial culture. Finally, taking Antoine Berman’s proposition for an ethical translation, which embraces the foreign and rejects ethnocentrism, the conclusion to be drawn is that the translator’s option to keep Igbo terms in her work respected the author’s manifest intention of, through her work, showing the readers from other countries a bit of Nigeria’s culture and history.