EARLY SPANISH AND AZTEC LOAN WORDS IN THE INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES OF NORTHWEST MEXICO

1990 ◽  
pp. 351-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wick R. Miller
Author(s):  
Fúnmi O. Olúbòdé-Sàwè

This chapter looks at how the demands of modern day discourse behavior may impact upon and/or transform the use of indigenous African languages, as their speakers try to cope with and/or utilize computer-based communication gadgets and access/publish information on the information superhighway. It also presents a critique of one such effort at translating information on one brand of cell phone into major Nigerian languages. Drawing from the Yorùbá option, the authors show that new terminology has been created using the strategies of Terminologization, composition and translingual borrowing, but there are problems of inaccurate translation, use of non-standard orthography and non-indigenization of loan words. The chapter therefore proposes further refinement in subsequent terminology projects, especially the possibility of producing one-key symbols to represent the distinctive graphological symbols of indigenous African languages.


Author(s):  
Nancy Farriss

Missionaries and Indian elites cooperated in translating the gospel message into the indigenous languages. They faced an inevitable trade-off between fidelity to Christian orthodoxy and intelligibility within the alien Mesoamerican culture. The result was either a deficit of meaning for the neophytes or a surplus of meaning created by attaching alien indigenous connotations to the Christian discourse. Zapotec and other indigenous doctrinal texts reveal a range of choices: at one extreme, terms deemed untranslatable, like “God” and “soul,” were imported as loan words; at another extreme, difficult terms were given elaborate explanatory glosses (periphrasis) in the target language, which elucidated meaning but at the expense of economy and fluency of expression.


1969 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis-Jacques Dorais

This article examines how translation to and from Inuktitut, the language of the Eastern Canadian Inuit, often compels the translator to create new words or explanatory phrases in the target language, in order to cope with the existing cultural and semantic gaps between most Indigenous languages and languages of wider communication. Moreover, the transcription of Inuktitut into the syllabic script also entails phonetic distortions. The article concludes that some types of translations in Inuktitut are practically useless, but that more Inuktitut oral and written texts should be translated into mainstream languages.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document