Entry | South Africa

AFR Suid-Afrika SOT Afrika Borwa SPA Sudáfrica

contents
Introduction | Translation in the pre-Dutch period (before 1652) | Translation during the Dutch mercantilist period (1652-1795, 1803-1806) | Translation during the British colonial period (1795-1803, 1806-1910) | Decline of British rule and emergence of Afrikaner domination (1910-1961) | Translation during the Afrikaner period (1961-1994) | Translation during the Democratic period (1994-) | Research potential

Introduction

To grasp the varied assortment of the history of translation in South Africa, one has to take into account the language and religious tapestry as well as the transitional periods in South African history.

According to the Ethnologue the total population of South Africa is 60,143,000 with a literacy rate of 87% (2017 UNESCO). South Africa has twelve official languages since 19 July 2023. The eleven official languages (from 1994 to 18 July 2023) have the following first (L1) and second (L2) language users in South Africa: isiZulu 27,300,000, English 19,640,000, isiXhosa 19,150,000, Afrikaans 17,160,000, Sesotho sa Leboa 13,720,000, Setswana 11,770,000, Sesotho 11,750,000, Xitsonga 5,680,000, siSwati 3,700,000, Tshivenda 2,910,000, and isiNdebele 2,490,000. South African Sign Language (with 500,000 users) was recognised as a language to be promoted and became the twelfth official language on 19 July 2023.

The number of established languages listed for South Africa is thirty-six; thirty-one are living and five are extinct. Of the living languages, twenty are indigenous and eleven are non-indigenous. Since no language is dominant, translation plays an essential role to facilitate communication in the society.


Maps of South Africa [Source]

Concerning religious affiliations, the General Household Survey of 2015 provides the following data: An estimated 86% of the population are affiliated to Christianity, 5.4% subscribes to traditional religions, Islam forms 1.9% of the population, Hindus 0.9% , the Jewish religion 0.2% and other religions (0.4%), while 5.2% are not affiliated to any religion. Since the majority of the population is involved in religious practice, religious translation is dominant.

South African history is divided into four principal periods (Naudé 2005a: 168-169): Dutch (1652-1795, 1803-1806), British (1795-1803, 1806-1961), Afrikaner (1961-1990), and social-democratic (since 1994). Each period demonstrates a unique ideology, which influenced translation practice of that period.

Translation in the pre-Dutch period (before 1652)

The earliest exchange between Europeans and Africans in the Southern African region took place in the 15^th century stimulated by the Arabic-Jewish Golden Age, which featured Jewish intellectuals who acted as translators into Latin and other European languages of the scientific writings of the Greeks, Arabs, and Jews themselves. They provided instruments and maps to the Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, and conveyed nautical information that a new route to the Indies could be found by sailing down the west coast of Africa. After rounding Africa’s Cape of Good Hope (the southwestern part of contemporary South Africa around Cape Town), he reached India on 20 May 1498. One of the navigators, Fernāo Martins, who could speak both Hebrew and Arabic, was valued for his interpreting skills. Although Martins struggled to interpret the clicks of the Khoi language, he attained a prominent role in Mozambique, where he could converse in Arabic with the Muslim traders (Herrman 1935: 21; Naudé 2020: 16). The focus of the Portuguese was not on South Africa, but on the trade with India, although they established trade (and missionary) centres since 1505 on the coast of East Africa in the present-day Mozambique (near the territory ruled by the mysterious Monomotapa).

Since 1580 English ships passed the Cape of Good Hope. In 1613 the crew of an English ship captured two Khoi men. One of them died on the sea journey. The second one, Coree, became an English-Khoi interpreter, but he disappeared in 1626. The next interpreter was a Khoi called Autshumato of the Goringhaicona clan, a group of sedentary, non-pastoral hunter-gatherers who collected shellfish in the vicinity of Table Bay (Wells 2014: 37). Autshumato also served as a postal agent for passing ships from a number of countries.

Translation during the Dutch mercantilist period (1652-1795, 1803-1806)

The Dutch East India Company founded a new community in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 and officially imposed not only the Reformed faith and church as the sole religion, but also Dutch monolingualism. Dutch was the only language which was allowed to be used in every church and school (Naudé 2020: 17). The Dutch Statenvertaling [State Translation], which was published in 1637, was the only Bible used.

Translations took place orally, in the form of interpretation between Dutch colonists and indigenous people. Khoi interpreters, such as Autshumato (called Harry by the Dutch) until his imprisonment on Robben Island, his niece, Krotoa (called Eva by the Dutch) and Omani (called Doman by the Dutch) of the Goringhaiqua clan, who were pastoralists, played an important role in enabling communication between the Dutch and the Khoi during the seventeenth century, with the result that the Dutch colonists did not acquire the Khoi languages (Wells 2014: 37-45). Furthermore, since the Khoi were able to communicate in pidgin Dutch, the Khoi languages were replaced by Dutch, with the result that at the end of the eighteenth century, there was no longer a need to interpret between the Khoi languages and Dutch, resulting eventually in the death of the Khoi languages (Botha & Beukes 2019: 246-247).

Since many Goringhaicona were proletarianised as odd-job workers and the Goringhaiqua provided livestock to the Dutch as food for the trading ships, the policy of the Company was not to make slaves of the indigenous population, but to import them (Wells 2014: 38). From 1658 slaves were brought from West Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, India, Ceylon, and Indonesia. Dutch was used as the only language of learning for slave children and as the working language between Dutch slave owners and their slaves. The slaves acquired pidgin Dutch in their encounters with the Khoi and contributed their own modifications, resulting in its stabilisation as a pidgin during the last decades of the seventeenth century. It is from this linguistic background that the Afrikaans language eventually emerged. It was the arrival of Muslim slaves, free Muslims and exiles at the Cape of Good Hope that introduced Islam to South Africa (Mahida 1992: 1-7). The Muslim variety of Afrikaans that developed over the course of time was unique (Davids 2011: 293-299).


Krotoa (1643-1674), one of the first known South African interpreters [Source]	Simond, Les Veillés Afriquaines [Source]

Pierre Simond, pastor of the French Huguenots who arrived in the Cape between 1688 and 1700, translated the Psalms of David into unrhymed French verse under the title, Les Veillés Afriquaines (African Watch Hours) in approximately 1690. However, the Synod of the Reformed Church in the Netherlands, which controlled religious practice in the Cape, rejected the translation, and it was privately published by Simond himself.

Wilhelm de Grevenbroek, a Cape intellectual, who also compiled an isiXhosa vocabulary, sent written translations into Khoi language of the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Nicene Creed to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who published them in 1717 in the form of Dutch–Khoi interlinear translations for the purposes of comparative philology rather than religion (Botha & Beukes 2019: 247).

To summarise, the policy of Dutch monolingualism is the main reason for the near absence of any kind of translation activity even though multiple languages (Dutch, French, and Khoi) were spoken in one geographical region—a situation that usually gives rise to translation activity.

Translation during the British colonial period (1795-1803, 1806-1910)

The first British occupation (1795-1803) ended the first Dutch settlement under the Dutch East India Company in 1795. The new Batavian Republic of the Netherlands ruled between 1803 and 1806 under the terms of the Treaty of Amiens (1802). In 1804 Commissioner-General De Mist extended religious tolerance at the Cape by means of a church ordinance, which meant religious equality for persons of all creeds. This new order was maintained by the British, who occupied the Cape in 1806. As a result, not only adherents of non-Reformed varieties of Protestantism, such as Moravians and Lutherans, were allowed religious freedom, but adherents of Islam and the Jewish religion were as well (Herrman 1935: 90-91). However, the British enforced English to reduce the domination of Dutch in the Cape and to impose their traditions upon the African people. Anglicisation threatened the usage of Dutch in churches and schools. In addition to Anglicisation, the abolition of the slave trade and the Frontier Wars against the amaXhosa (1835-1853) led by Britain resulted in the mass movement of Dutch farmers to the interior of the country around 1838, which led to the creation of two Dutch-speaking Boer Republics in the interior (in 1852) and two English-speaking British colonies on the coast (in 1854).

A new factor during the British colonial period was the missionary outreach by Protestant evangelicals. Religious translation in the indigenous South African languages, inter alia Kora, Nama, Sehlapi, Serolong, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, isiXhosa and isiZulu, was used for evangelical purposes to make sacred writings (hymns, catechisms, creeds, the ten commandments, gospel tracts, sermons and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress) accessible to their users, but also played a role in language development, the formation of cultural identities and nationalisation (Landau 2010: 74-107; Hofmeyr 2004). A Nama translator, Zara Shmelen, was inter alia responsible for the first translations of the gospels into Nama in 1831.

A South African branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) was founded in 1820 in Cape Town. It was not directly involved in translation at that stage but gave financial assistance and printing materials to enable various mission societies to publish translations done by their missionaries.

Many complete Bible translations in the indigenous South African languages followed. Setswana was the first South African language to receive a complete Bible in 1857, translated by the pioneer Bible translator, Robert Moffat, and published by the London Missionary Society (Smit 1970: 195-200).

Robert Moffat, as painted by George Baxter in 1843 [Source]

The first complete isiXhosa Bible was published by the Wesleyan Missionary Society in 1859, mainly translated by John Appleyard and Albert Kroft (Smit 1970: 205). Appleyard revised the translation and published it in 1864; it is referred to as the Appleyard Version. This translation was not well received and was criticised by a section of the amaXhosa themselves, as well as by Reverend Tiyo Soga (1831-1871), who translated The Pilgrim’s Progress into isiXhosa (Davis 2018: 306, 311). Between 1858 and 1865, he took the lead in petitioning for the creation of a translation board, which was established in 1868 to start a revision of the Appleyard Bible (Smit 1970: 207). Soga was involved with the translation of the Book of Acts when he died in 1871 (Davis 2018: 311). The revised New Testament was published in 1875, but especially the Mfengo of the amaXhosa refused to accept the revised translation, giving preference to that of Appleyard (Smit 1970: 207). Eventually, the revision of the complete isiXhosa Bible was issued in 1889 (Smit 1970: 208). The third language into which the complete Bible was translated was Sesotho. Basutoland, currently known as Lesotho, the home country of the Southern Sotho-speaking people, was opened to Christian missionary work in 1833/1834 (Casalis 1861; Ellenberger 1912; Makutoane & Naudé 2009: 81). Their leader Moshoeshoe also acknowledged the importance of acquiring skills from the farmers, settlers, hunters, and adventurers who increasingly moved across his borders from the south. He therefore welcomed the missionaries from the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (Société des Missions Évangéliques) as a source of information about the rest of the world when they arrived at Thaba Bosiu in 1833 (Makutoane & Naudé 2009: 81; see also Harries 2007). For commodity production on farms and for trading, a kind of pidgin language developed to facilitate communication between Dutch/Afrikaans-speaking farmers and the speakers of Sesotho. This terminology was used by the translators of the first Sesotho Bible translation (Makutoane & Naudé 2009: 88-91). By 1878 the complete Bible was translated by missionaries of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society. It was published in 1881 in one volume and is still in use. The fourth complete translation in an indigenous South African language in the nineteenth century was the isiZulu Bible, which was published in 1883 by the American Zulu Mission/American Bible Society (Masubelele 2009: 63-78).

The earliest attempts to translate the Bible into Afrikaans started with the attempts by the Bible Translation Movement (1872-1911). In 1873 C. P. Hoogenhout translated Matthew 28 into Afrikaans, but De Kerkbode [The Church Messenger], the official church magazine of the Dutch Reformed Church, refused to publish it. However, in the same year he published his Afrikaansified version of a well-known Bible narrative of Joseph. In 1878 Hoogenhout and a few friends translated the Gospel of Mark from the Dutch Statenvertaling. This was the first book of the Bible translated into Afrikaans, but it was never published because the British and Foreign Bible Society rejected the Afrikaners’ request for a Bible. In 1889 a book with three samples of the Bible in Afrikaans was published by S. J. du Toit.


S.J. du Toit, Di Bybel in Afrikaans [The Bible in Afrikaans] (1889) [Source]	Lucy Lloyd notebooks: Story: Lion and giraffe; Contributors \|\|kabbo (Jantje) [Source]

Du Toit and his co-workers then translated eight biblical books, which were published privately. The death of Du Toit in 1911 led to the termination of the project. This attempt failed because the hegemonic Dutch language and its Statenvertaling were preferred over the dominated Afrikaans “dialect”.

The unidirectional nature of missionary translation was reversed when portions of African oral literature, viewed as esoteric and mysterious by the hegemonic culture, were recorded and translated into European languages. Lucy Lloyd and Dorothea Bleek, who researched First Nation languages, played an important role in translating folklore, history and indigenous knowledge from the languages /Xam and !Kung into English (Botha & Beukes 2019: 249-250).

The French translators of the Sesotho Bible excelled in this practice. In 1842 Thomas Arbousset rendered a Sesotho lament and the lyrics of a Sesotho rain prayer in French and English, while Eugène Casalis provided French translations of selections of Sesotho literature consisting of triumphal songs, hunting songs, proverbs, riddles, tales or legends, and fables. Bishop John Colenso of Natal published in 1860 three isiZulu accounts of his visit in 1859 to the king of the Zulus, Umpande, with explanatory notes, a literal translation, and a glossary of all the isiZulu words employed.

The attainment of freedom of worship in 1804 at the Cape of Good Hope also influenced the practice of religion by Muslims. After the release of Tuān Gūrū, also known as Imān Abdullāh, from Robben Island in 1793, he received permission from the British to establish a religious school, where reading and writing in Arabic was taught and where the literacy teaching of Arabic-Afrikaans (Afrikaans written in Arabic script) emerged (Mahida 1992: 9-10; Davids 2011: 64-75). Arabic was not taught as a language, although the symbols of Arabic script were taught through Malay. Afrikaans written in Arabic script was used extensively (Davids 2011: 18-19, 25). Translations from Arabic into Afrikaans functioned to import religious knowledge into South African Islamic communities from Arab centres of Islam. The most important of these is Abu Bakr Effendi’s Uiteensetting van die godsdiens [Exposition of Religion] (published in 1869, although it previously circulated in manuscript form for 12 years) (Davids 2011: 216-226).


Abu Bakr Effendi’s Bayân al-Dîn ['Uiteensetting van die godsdiens' or 'Exposition of the Religion'] [Source]	Cachet, Tiyo Soga (1888) [Source]

Abu Bakr Effendi had been sent from Kurdistan in 1862 by the sultan of Turkey to the Cape to serve the Muslim community as a religious teacher. He wrote various books with the same layout: An Arabic text followed by an Afrikaans translation and exposition written in Arabic script.

The period 1815-1915 represents the zenith of the Arabic-Afrikaans writing tradition; the last book in this style was published in 1957 (Davids 2011: 89-206).

Only a handful of Jews of English, Dutch and German origin availed themselves of the opportunity of religious tolerance extended by De Mist in 1804 (Herrman 1935: 90-91). Joseph Suasso de Lima, who arrived before 1820, was inter alia a sworn interpreter (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Malayan, Chinese, Malabar, French, Spanish, and Dutch), translator, author and publisher (Herrman 1935: 94-95). He translated the drama The Wandering Jew from French into Dutch in 1837 (Herrman 1935: 95). Herrman (1935: 199-202) also discusses the great influence on their adopted country of Jews who abandoned their faith for that of Christianity. As an example, Frans Lion Cachet, born of Dutch-Jewish parents in Amsterdam, arrived in 1858 as a missionary to the Muslims. In 1888, he published his Dutch translation of the biography of Tiyo Soga, the isiXhosa Bible translator, written by John Chalmers in English.

Since the 1870s there is evidence of Dutch, German and English folklore in the form of songs, narratives, poems, dramas, proverbs and riddles translatedinto Afrikaans. The terms Afrikaansified (verafrikaans), transposed (omsit) or reworked (verwerk) are utilised to describe this translation activity. For most of these translations in Afrikaans no specific translators are known. Examples are the song Sarie Marais, which is related to the American song Ellie Rhee, with no known translator, and the collection of poems, Vijftig uitgesogte Afrikaanse gedigte (Fifty chosen Afrikaans poems), published first in 1888 (and expanded to sixty-two poems in the fifth edition of 1916) by F.W. Reitz in which he indicated that most of the authors of the poems and the translators of translated poems are unknown. Some of the poems by Robert Burns, for example, Tam O’Shanter’s Ride is translated by F. W. Reitz himself as Klaas Gezwint en syn paert (Klaas Gezwint and his horse) and Duncan Gray as Daantjie Gouws. His father translated The Cotter’s Saturday Night as Saterdagaant in ’n boerewoning (Saturday evening in a farmhouse). Other known Afrikaans translators of folklore include Willie H. Maskew (1861-1903), Melt Brink (1842-1925) and Willie Versfeld (1870-1939).

As pseudotranslation, the first Afrikaans novel by SJ du Toit, Di Koningin fan Skeba (The Queen of Sheba) (1898), concerns the fictive translation of a so-called parchment scroll in Classical Hebrew purporting to have been written by Elihoref, Solomon’s scribe and consort of the queen of Sheba, as well as the fictive translation of the three so-called parchment scrolls discovered beneath Mount Afoer in what was then Rhodesia. The novel played an important role in transforming Afrikaans from a colloquial language to a cultural language by proving that it is possible to write in Afrikaans about a topic that is spatially and chronologically remote from the common colloquial language.

Decline of British rule and emergence of Afrikaner domination (1910-1961)

The Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), which was fought against the Afrikaners for the sake of British investment in the gold mines, was a watershed episode in South African history. The subsequent decline of British rule and the emergence of Afrikaner domination of South African history resulted in the eventual institutionalisation of the political system of white dominance or apartheid in 1948. With the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, the Afrikaners soon started to develop their own form of nationalism, setting the stage for the second attempt to produce an Afrikaans Bible translation, which followed from the initiative of the churches (1916-1923) as part of the Afrikaans language movement (1914-1925) (Smit 1970: 228).

The first impact related to the planning of the first Afrikaans Bible translation was on translation theory in the form of an attempt to compile lists of rules for translators based essentially on philological comparisons of texts. A monograph on Bible translation was undertaken in the Netherlands by F. W. Grosheide (1916), which influenced the South African translators. The monograph has a principles part and a practical part (see Naudé 2020: 10 footnote 19). This monograph was read and summarised by J. D. du Toit (popularly known as Totius) in a popular church publication, Het Kerkblad [The Church Magazine], in 1916. He then set the rules for Afrikaans Bible translation as follows: i) The translators must be trained in Biblical languages and must be able to handle Afrikaans. ii) The number of the translators must not be too large, and they must check each other’s work to establish unity. iii) The translators must be from all three Dutch churches in South Africa. iv) The number of readers must be large to check the Afrikaans. v) The comments of the readers must be incorporated by the translators in the translation. vi) The rules of the method must be restricted to issues of language and style and there must be agreement on them.

Due to the interference of the Dutch language from the Statenvertaling in the translation during a time when the Afrikaans language was important for Afrikaner identity, the translation of the Gospels and the Psalms in Afrikaans (1922) failed.

In 1925 Afrikaans became an official language of South Africa next to English and Dutch (Act 8 of 1925). (Dutch had regained its status as an official language alongside English in 1882 and was later removed in Act 110 of 1983). The result was that translation bureaus were established to handle large-scale translation activities in government administration, which had previously been dominated by English.

The first complete translation of the Bible in Afrikaans, a word-for-word or literal translation, was published in 1933 as the seventh Bible translated in South Africa (Naudé 2011). The use of the same Hebrew and Greek source texts used for the Statenvertaling provided authority to this translation so that it replaced the Statenvertaling in the Afrikaans-speaking community. The first complete Afrikaans translation of 1933 was produced during the period of Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa and was used to justify merging the Afrikaner’s own national identity with that of Old Testament Israel (Naudé 2005a: 172-175).

Concerning the revision of the 1933 Bible translation, Barend Gemser provided rules for translation, which he summarised from the rules provided by Martin Luther (1483-1546), Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687-1752), and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) in their writings for the production of Bible translations (Naudé 2020: 10 footnote 17). Gemser argued for translation “principles” in a lecture on 5 May 1945 for Ons Taalkring [Our Language Circle] at the University of Pretoria, which agree with eight of the nine rules of Bengel, namely, that the translation must reflect the source text in terms of word order, retention of foreign expressions, tone and style, while following the natural language (not too colloquial or too stilted) (Naudé 2020: 10 footnote 18).

As in the nineteenth century, Bible translation continued its ideological role in the twentieth century to develop the indigenous South African languages and to construct distinct African cultural identities. The role of the first Xitsonga Bible translation (1929) in empowering and legitimising colonialism within the Vatsonga society has been explored by Maluleke (2017). The translation made extensive use of loan words from neighbouring African languages, especially Sesotho, as well as from the colonial languages spoken in South Africa (English and Afrikaans), but not from French (the language of the Swiss missionaries among the Vatsonga). In this way, the translation enhanced the vocabulary inventory of Xitsonga by expanding the range of items which could be described in the language. Some indigenous words referring to traditional religious practices and practitioners were avoided, thus promoting colonial Christianity. Most importantly, the 1929 version united the diverse sub-units of the Vatsonga people around a single translation of the Bible.

Other Bible translations and retranslations in the indigenous South African languages during this era were Sepedi (1904, revised 1951), Tshivenda (1936), and isiZulu (1959).

The policy of separate development after 1948 provided the means for the development of the indigenous languages. All emerging South African languages initially relied on translation of classics from the hegemonic language(s), that is, the trajectory of translation implies the inflow of world literature to fulfil the need for textbooks in schools and as a means of literary production to elevate their cultural status. At least two trends are detected. An example of the first trend is The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, which was written in 1894 representing a western context, and was translated into isiXhosa by GB Sinxo in 1958. The translator chose to adhere to the hegemonic source text system in transferring the source culture royal life system into the dominated target culture. In this process, the source language words become loan words in the target language in order to enrich Xhosa culture (Naudé 2005b: 48-50). It was also translated into isiZulu. Examples of the second trend are the English novels situated in an African context by H. Rider Haggard, who held a position in the colonial government in South Africa. His novel King Solomon's Mines (1885) was translated into isiXhosa, Sesotho and isiZulu, She (1887) into isiZulu, isiXhosa and Setswana, and Nada the Lily (1949) into isiZulu. To render the books acceptable for readers, the translators followed a strategy to rehabilitate customs and cultural kinship systems of the dominated culture by removing overt racist background, thus giving recognition to the inherent humanity of black identity (Naudé 2005b: 42-45).

Between 1933 and 1938, more than six thousand German Jews immigrated to South Africa (Hull 2009: 140). These Jews soon mastered English and some of them also Afrikaans; by 1950 they were assimilated into the white population (Hull 2009: 135). It is against this background that the translation of important Jewish religious works into Afrikaans and English must be understood. In the 1940s Rabbi Dr M Romm published Afrikaans translations from the Talmud. In 1951 he published his translation of the Prayer book into Afrikaans, dedicating the book to all the founders of the Afrikaner nation to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Jan van Riebeeck’s landing in South Africa in 5712 (1952). In 1968 Roman B. Egert translated the Passover Haggada in Afrikaans.

In 1956 Imām Mohammed A. Baker of Simonstown, a qualified teacher, started to work on a translation of thirty sections of the Holy Qur’ān in Afrikaans and published it in 1961.

Translation during the Afrikaner period (1961-1994)

On 31 May 1961 the Republic of South Africa came into being and introduced an era of Afrikaner dominance. The language clause (section 119 of Act 32 of 1961) of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa provided for Afrikaans and English as official languages at national and regional level and for nine African languages (isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sepedi, Setswana, Sesotho, Xitsonga, siSwati, Tshivenda, isiNdebele) as official languages at the regional level only, that is, in the so-called Bantustans.

Around this time, actions were taken to end English domination. The principle of equality led to a dispensation where every right granted to English was also granted to Afrikaans. All official documents were to be produced in both languages. To achieve this requirement, empowerment for Afrikaans translation was necessary. One initiative was the founding of the South African Translators’ Institute (SATI) in 1956. Although Afrikaans had official status alongside English since 1925, the governmental structures and the civil service were not competent in using Afrikaans after decades of English domination. An impetus for the founding of SATI was a desire to support the promotion and support of Afrikaans in the public service and in government structures (South African Translators’ Institute 2006). Initially the focus was on Afrikaans translation and terminology, managed by institutions such as the Johannesburg Municipality, the South African Railways and the South African Defense Force. The Language Services Bureau of the Department of Cultural Affairs was responsible for the language and terminological requirements of the public service and the Vaktaalburo [Bureau for Technical Terminology] of the South African Academy for Science and Arts for the development of Afrikaans technical language. Afrikaans translation in all fields (financial, technical, judiciary and security services, education, agriculture, medical care, etc.) was made possible with the production of numerous technical bilingual language dictionaries, for example, Kriminologie-woordeboek – Criminology Dictionary, Chemie-woordeboek -- Chemical Dictionary, Statistiekwoordeboek -- Statistical Dictionary, Wynbouwoordebek – Wine Dictionary, Drukkerswoordeboek -- Printing Dictionary, Borduurwoordeboek -- Dictionary of Embroidery and Sokkerwoordeboek – Soccer Dictionary. During this era, SATI worked on professionalism, training, expanding its membership, generating publicity for the profession, and improving conditions for members. There was also expansion in translation services for foreign languages and in judicial courts.

Another event was that the Bible Society of South Africa (BSSA) became fully autonomous from the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1965. During this time Eugene Nida was developing his linguistic-oriented theory of dynamic equivalence translation. In 1967 Nida and other scholars conducted a seminar in Turfloop, South Africa, which was attended by more than 100 persons representing 17 Bible translation projects in South Africa and Namibia for which the BSSA was responsible. A set of principles for translation was worked out (Nida & Taber 1974: 181-186). Afterwards Nida visited South Africa frequently, lecturing on Bible translation and semantics. His lectures at SATI in 1977, 1978 and 1979 led to closer contact between the BSSA and SATI. This influenced the research of Johannes Louw on the semantics of New Testament Greek, resulting in his 1976 publication in Afrikaans and in English in which he discussed semantics as a new field of study (Porter & Ong 2016: 291-292). With the aim of providing a tool for Bible translators, Louw and Nida also published a Greek-English lexicon based on semantic domains in 1988.

A retranslation of the complete Bible in Afrikaans followed, using Nida’s dynamic-equivalence principles. It was published in 1983 as the Nuwe Afrikaanse Vertaling (New Afrikaans Translation) in the period leading up to the first democratic government in South Africa. Because of the translators’ strategic decisions to introduce novel vocabulary of reconciliation and to apply strategies of substitution, generalisation, deletion, and paraphrase for minimising the apartheid vocabulary in the proof texts that were used in church policies to justify apartheid, the translation succeeded in dismantling the justification of apartheid in the Afrikaans-speaking churches (Naudé 2005a: 172-175).

The 1989 Xitsonga Bible translation (in contrast to the 1929 translation), strengthened the cultural identity of Xitsonga by utilising not only indigenous cultural terms of Xitsonga, but also by utilising and coining natural Xitsonga equivalents, and by utilising Xitsonga first-language speakers as translators (Maluleke 2017). The 1989 version employed a dynamic-equivalence approach. The standardisation and simplification of the orthographic system for writing Xitsonga and the harmonisation of dialectal variants served to strengthen and unify Xitsonga as a language, thus further strengthening cultural identity.

Other Bible translations that were influenced by dynamic equivalence include: Sesotho (1989), isiXhosa (1996), siSwati (1996), Tshivenda (1998), Sepedi (2000), and isiNdebele (2012).

A new edition of the Holy Qur’ān in Afrikaans with a revised translation was published in 2005 by the Islamic Dawah Movement of South Africa with reprints in 2008 and 2014. It was also distributed in Namibia and Botswana. The persons responsible for the translation were Ebrahim Dada, Imam Abdurrashid Talap, Farhad Khabeer and Shaheed Meniers.

In addition to service translation in the civil service, technical and religious translation, this era is also typified by literary translation of indigenous writings into hegemonic languages in order to overcome cultural exclusion, especially in the case of censorship of resistant writings (Naudé 2005b). Resistant writers were extensively translated into world languages in order to expose the injustices within South African society to international audiences. The trajectory of translation results in the outflow of literature, which is published in most cases abroad, first in English which subsequently serves as part of the incipient system for translations mostly into other European languages, but also into Middle Eastern and Asian languages. The most prolific translations are those of books by Afrikaans authors such as André P. Brink, which are translated into 30 languages, Breyton Breytenbach into 15 languages and Elsa Joubert into 13 languages (Botha & Beukes 2019: 259-261).

At least three strategies were followed to realise an English text in addition to an indigenous one (Naudé 2005b). One strategy is literature simultaneously realised in the dominated and in the hegemonic language. An example is the prominent South African novelist, André P. Brink, who wrote his novels in both Afrikaans and English, implementing certain strategies in the hegemonic language (English) to render it acceptable to a global market, but retaining the original cultural identity in the dominated language (Afrikaans). A second strategy is to write in the dominated language followed by a translation in the hegemonic language. To acquire a readership—not only in South Africa but also internationally—A. C. Jordan and his wife Priscilla translated the isiXhosa classic Ingqumbo Yeminyanya (1940) into English as Wrath of the Ancestors (1980). Cultural aspects of the source culture are maintained in the translation to allow for the clear demarcation of the Xhosa cultural group and to reflect the truly South African flavour of the novel. A third strategy is to write in the hegemonic language followed by a translation in the dominated language. R. L. Peteni’s English novel Hill of Fools (1976) was translated or re-written by the author in isiXhosa as KwaZidenge (1980). In the English version, the characters and their relationships are described, a glossary is provided, and place names are explained and translated. However, this is not the case with the isiXhosa translation, which deleted descriptions of familiar cultural aspects.

The books of the English resistant authors, for example, J. M. Coetzee, and Nadine Gordimer, both Nobel literature laureates, were also extensively translated (both in more than 30 languages) (Botha 2020: 168-175). Because of the constraint of censorship, translations into Afrikaans were non-political canonised Western and children literature (Botha 2020: 164-168). Examples are the translations into Afrikaans by A.P. Brink of Mark Twain’s The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Lewis Carroll’s The adventures of Alice in Wonderland. Winners of the translation prize of the South African Academy for Science and Art include Afrikaans translations of works by Euripides, Sophocles, Aristotle, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Goethe and Molière. Utilising the strategy of literary rejuvenation by translation into Afrikaans (40% of the literary corpus between 1958 and 1965 was Afrikaans translations) was part of the attempt to free Afrikaans literature from isolation and self-obsession by the translators of the resistant movement (Botha 2020: 165).

Translation during the Democratic period (1994- )

South Africa became a constitutional democracy in 1994 after a long struggle against the political system of white dominance. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (Act 108 of 1996) recognises 11 official languages and expects government to implement positive measures to elevate the status and advance the use of these languages, an on-going and emergent process considering that English is still the dominant language and translation is under-utilised (Botha & Beukes 2019: 261-265). South African Sign Language (with 500,000 users) became the twelfth official language on 19 July 2023. The national and provincial governments may use any of the official languages, but must use at least two; Hansard contains all speeches in the language in which they were delivered, followed by an English translation. To protect language rights and to facilitate language development, the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB) (Act 59 of 1995) was established, which created national language bodies for each of the eleven official languages as well as for Khoi, Nama, San and South African Sign Language. During 2000 and 2001 PanSALB also established National Lexicography Units for each of the official languages at tertiary institutions throughout South Africa. This scenario forced SATI to adapt its practices to represent translation services in all the official languages of South Africa and to obtain acceptance in international oganisations such as FIT. SATI also initiated a journal, Muratho, which accepts articles in all South African official languages, provided they are accompanied by an English summary.

Muratho cover illustration [Source]

Translator training at tertiary institutions was stimulated; in the early 2000s qualifications in translation at undergraduate and postgraduate levels were offered at 13 tertiary institutions. To standardise training and to control quality the Standards Generating Body for Translation, Language Editing and Interpreting of the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) functioned between 2000 and 2004.

The change in translation situations has called for a change in translator training to teach prospective translators to produce accessible translations, which are not based on rigid theories of translation. A suitable approach is the functionalist model, specifically the contribution of Christiane Nord, who has visited South Africa on a regular basis since 2001 and who is also extraordinary professor at the University of the Free State (Nord 2018: 124-125). As a rule, this approach posits that it must be the intended function (skopos) of the target text contained in the translation brief that determines translation methods and strategies and not the function of the source text. Another approach which influenced translator training in South Africa, is descriptive translation studies, based inter alia on the work of Theo Hermans and Gideon Toury. Utilising this approach, post graduate students at various institutions studied how cultural knowledge is shaped by translation (Naudé 2005b: 35-58). In 2008 a special edition of the Journal for New Generation Science was published on socio-constructive language practice training in the South African context.

In August 2001 a Symposium on Bible Translation was organised to update BSSA personnel and academics on the advances in the field of translation theory as a basis for the next translation of the Bible into contemporary Afrikaans, which had been requested by some churches (Naudé & Van der Merwe 2002).

Mona Baker conducted a workshop in Pretoria in 2001 on corpus-based translation studies (CTS). It was followed in July 2003 by an international conference on CTS in Pretoria hosted by the University of South Africa and the University of Manchester, the papers of which were published in Language Matters in 2004.

The second conference of the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies was held in Cape Town in 2006. The papers of the panel on the Bible and its translations within the context of colonial encounters with the indigenous were published as a monograph in Acta Theologica Supplementum in 2009. The volume also includes papers of a conference celebrating the 150 years of the Bible in Setswana in 2007 and those of the academic day celebrating the seventy-five anniversary of the Bible in Afrikaans on 27 August 2008, both held in Bloemfontein. Since 2009 training for postgraduate students during the Spring School for Translation Studies in Africa occurs regularly. In 2012 a dedicated co-editor for language practice (translation studies) was included next to the two linguistics and applied linguistics co-editors on the editorial committee of the ISI-listed journal Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies. In 2016 the Association for Translation Studies in Africa was founded and in 2018 its Journal for Translation Studies in Africa was initiated. The first conference of the association was in May 2018 in Stellenbosch and the first issue of the journal was published in 2020.

A current development in translation studies originating from South African soil involves the reconceptualisation of translation within the frame of complexity thinking by Kobus Marais, a translation studies scholar from the University of the Free State. Marais argues that it might be more fruitful to consider translation as a complex phenomenon and therefore an emergent phenomenon, rather than considering it in terms of successive ‘turns’. With the rise of semiotic approaches within complexity thinking to translation, translation will need to avoid reductionism by avoiding the dualism of focusing either on the source (incipient) or target (subsequent) culture (Marais 2014, 2019, 2023).

Marais, Trajectories of Translation: The Thermodynamics of Semiosis (2023) [Source]

Building on the spirit of the times, simplified Bible versions for specific purposes have been produced. Following a request by churches to meet the specific needs of Deaf persons for Bibles, the Bible Society of South Africa provided a special Afrikaans translation, Die Bybel vir Dowes [The Bible for the Deaf] (2007), with the aim to address the unique needs of Deaf persons, those who were born deaf or who use Sign Language. In response to a general need from the public and churches for a translation with simplified vocabulary and sentence structure, this translation was also published in 2008 as Die Bybel vir Almal [The Bible for All]. In 2019 an English version of the Bible for the Deaf was also published by the BSSA.

Other Bible translations and retranslations of the complete Bible in the indigenous South African languages were completed, namely isiXhosa (1996), siSwati (1996), Sepedi (2000), Tsivenda (1998), isiNdebele (2012), and isiZulu (2020).

A complete Bible retranslation in Afrikaans was published in 2020 by the BSSA. More than 142 co-workers from 26 Afrikaans denominations contributed to the translation process. It reads as if the Bible authors are speaking in fluent idiomatic Afrikaans, but source language stylistic features as well as key cultural terms are represented in the translation, if possible, and explained using paratexts (or, metatexts) such as an introduction, footnotes, and a word list. By utilising paratexts to make the otherness of the source text culture accessible to readers, the translation prevents reductionism with emphasis either on form or on meaning. A special edition, Die Hoofletteruitgawe [Capital Letter Edition], was published using capital letters for references to persons in the Old Testament that can be interpreted as referring to Christ.

There are also translations of the Holy Qur’an in at least isiXhosa (I’Kur’an Ezukileyo 2012), IsiZulu (I-Khur’aani Engcwele 2015) and Sesotho (Phetolele ea Koran Ka Sesotho 2016).

The context of literary translation is less polarised with the easing of social pressure since 1994 and the choice of texts to translate depends on their ability to transcend regional borders, that is, to have a universal appeal and able to be inter-culturally consumable. The most popular English language authors since 1994 are Wilbur Smith, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Laurens van der Post (of the old generation) and Mike Nicol and Niki Daly (of the new generation). Translations are mostly in French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, Latvian, Finnish, Serbian, Russian, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Japanese (Botha 2020: 192- 194). A large amount of literary translation (fiction and non-fiction, romantic novels, self-help guides, popular psychology and children’s and youth literature) is taking place especially between Afrikaans and Dutch, because of historical ties and language similarity, The most translated Dutch authors in Afrikaans are Herman de Coninck, Harry Mulisch, Karel Glastra van Loon, Gerrit Komrij and Adriaan van Dis. Afrikaans authors such as Etienne van Heerden, Marlene van Niekerk, Riana Scheepers, Dan Sleigh, Marita van der Vyver and Ingrid Winterbach enjoy favourable reception in the Netherlands and Flanders. Afrikaans poetry in Dutch translation is often published in bilingual editions, that is, Afrikaans alongside Dutch (Botha 2020:194-196). André P. Brink and Breyten Breytenbach are the most translated authors since 1994, but authors with a long writing career like Etienne van Heerden, Karel Schoeman and Antjie Krog are also widely translated internationally. New generation authors like Deon Meyer and Marita van der Vyver enjoyed popularity in translation (Botha 2020:196-197). The Afrikaans translation of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, a new Afrikaans translation of Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka (2017) and Afrikaans translations of indigenous poetry done as part of various projects undertaken by Antjie Krog are examples of translation of local black authors or of African literature (Botha (2020: 198-201). However, in general, there is very little translation of African literature (Botha 2020: 202-204).

A demand for multilingual translations arose in the fields of administration, social security, education, finance, law, and medicine into languages which lacked the corresponding terminologies and means of expression. In the field of education the demand arose for new concepts that appeared in the teaching materials for children up to twelve years in the learning areas of Mathematics, Natural Science and Technology, Human, Social, Economic, and Management Sciences; Arts and Culture, Life Orientation and Languages. For Mathematics the Terminology Coordination Section of the National Language Service compiled in 2003 a glossary of a thousand terms in all the official languages, which was the first of its kind (Multilingual Mathematics Dictionary for Grade R to 6). The team members of the various collaborator groups, who added term equivalents, were all first language speakers of the particular target languages.

Since some higher education institutions have shifted from bilingualism towards monolingualism for practical reasons, the popular opinion is that Afrikaans has experienced a decline in functional use in favour of English, which is predominant (Botha & Beukes 2019: 261–262). At tertiary institutions multilingual support systems are in place to support students whose home language is not English. Translation to and from indigenous languages plays a pivotal role in this endeavour.

By virtue of the fact that English is a global language, it dominates the other South African languages, which occupy a peripheral position. However, translation does not invalidate the importance of access to English as a global and economic language. Instead, translation circumscribes the domination of English so that indigenous languages are not diminished or impoverished.

Research potential

The history of translation in South Africa offers a wealth of potential research avenues. One of the most critical needs is for a comprehensive, integrated history of translation in South Africa that considers all sorts of translation—literary, informal, religious—as opposed to a reductionistic focus on literary translation. To achieve this goal, much more work must be done on the socio-cultural effects of specific translations throughout history: How have they affected society and shaped culture and cultural identity? What are the effects of translation efforts on related aspects such as language documentation, language development, language standardisation, language varieties, multilingualism, translanguaging and literacy?