Translating African Realities with Indigenous Perspectives and Digital Archives

By Bethlehem Attfield

Bethlehem Attfield discusses her PhD research on Amharic literature, the silencing of African knowledge, and the potential of AI in preserving and promoting African languages and culture.

African realities and culture have often been misinterpreted and will continue to do so if colonial and ethnocentric perspectives are used. As long as outlooks that prioritise Anglo-American socioeconomic interests continue to dominate, the rich diversity and complexity of African societies will remain misunderstood.  If this trend continues, there is a high chance that Artificial Intelligence (AI) language models will be created with the same Eurocentric bias, thus continuing the trend of distorting and misrepresenting African history, society, knowledge and culture.

The Historical Silencing of African Culture   

There is a bias in the field of Translation Studies towards using interlingual translation (or translation between languages) and looking at high culture at the expense of popular and informal culture. South African academics, Cobus Marais and Ilse Feinauer in their book, Translation Studies beyond the Postcolony (2016) suggest that Global South scholars can counter this tendency by “bringing different traditions to talking and listening to one another”.  One example of where a dialogue such as this occurred is between Addis Ababa University Institute of Ethiopian Studies and several European and American universities which resulted in the digitalising of ancient Ethiopian manuscripts (see Digitisation of endangered monastic archive).

Developments such as this in the digital humanities not only preserve indigenous knowledge, but also inspires scholars to go beyond acquiring knowledge via interlingual translation to being transdisciplinary knowledge transformers. For example, in my research I explore traditions of translating texts such as andem to develop a contemporary translation theory.

The diverse and complex realities in Africa have often been reduced to crude stereotypes. For example, in 1963, an Oxford University Professor, Trevor-Roper, declared in a lecture: “Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But, at present there is none: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness…” He faced huge criticism for this remark. In 1999, the Indian literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, describes this as ‘sanctioned ignorance’ referring to the academy’s purposeful and intentional silencing.

During my talk, I focussed on the silencing of African indigenous written works. Knowledge about indigenous African scripts and their significance is limited.  For example, the fact that the full manuscript of the Book of Enoch (an ancient Jewish apocalyptic religious text), was preserved through translation in an African script, Ge’ez, is not a widely known fact. The survival of the Ethiopic Enoch as the only complete version in the world signifies that the ancient Ethiopian manuscript corpus of knowledge had global significance in persevering manuscripts considered extinct in the rest of the world. Historians believe the original was written between the 3rd and 2nd century BCE in either Aramaic or Hebrew.  

Exploring the biases and factors that shape our knowledge

• Who produced the knowledge: missionaries and local administrators played a big role in developing and promoting a European language print culture
•  What was the time period and location: the colonial ideology which suppressed the use of vernacular languages and promoted European languages in all administrative systems and education was also responsible 
• The language used: the fact that European languages served as lingua-franca in the independence movement against colonisation     
•  For what purpose and audience: the emergence of African studies as critical study in Euro-American academics, and the choice of postcolonial proponents to use English for written expression     

Huggan also highlights the role of ‘anthropological exotic’ – perceiving anthropology as an encounter with the unordinary, dangerous, mysterious (Against Exoticism), as another factor for creating a homogeneous African literature and a corpus of knowledge. He explains: “The anthropological exotic, like other contemporary forms of exoticism discourse, describes a mode of both perception and consumption; it invokes the familiar aura of ‘foreign’ cultures by giving a glimpse of the culture through limited information”.

He further elaborates the problem of using an anthropological lens to understand literature that often leads to treating cultures as static, which can result in generalisation and misunderstanding. This can, in turn, lead to epistemic violence “which is a deliberate misrepresentation of knowledge through for example, denying epistemic agency or not acknowledging epistemic resources” (Moira Pérez)  – in this case it’s African literature and history.

African Translation Studies  

African Translation Studies is often analysed through postcolonial translation theory which involves resistance of colonial narratives by analysing literary text from colonised peoples’ perspective.      Recently however, some studies have tried to frame translation studies outside of the coloniser/colonised narrative by analysing for example precolonial traditions of interpretation. My research focuses on looking at translations through early indigenous traditions.     

Andem: an indigenous interpretive framework

Ethiopia, located in the Horn of Africa has a rich literary tradition that is believed to have originated from as early as fourth century CE (Common Era). This is when Christianity was adopted as a state religion in Aksum. The empire of Aksum, located in what is now Northern Ethiopia, was one of the world’s most influential ancient civilizations. It started during Classical antiquity 1st century and lasted until the 8th century. The literary language of this period was Ge’ez. Ge’ez is the most ancient sub-Saharan African script (and is still used today with little variation) to write Amharic, which is the official working language of the Ethiopian federal government. Ethiopia does not only have writing script but also an indigenous interpretive framework known as Andem.

Meaning making and transformation

Andem is an approach to Tirgum. Etymologically, the Amharic word ትርጉም (Tirgum), which means translation, is centred on meaning-making. This approach recognises that ‘meanings’ are subjective and open to reinterpretation. Unlike linguistic focused translation theories which emphasise preserving     meaning through ‘transference’, Tirgum focuses on recontextualising of an obscure or foreign text. If one were to find a metaphor for Tirgum, it would be ‘transformation’. 

Studies that seek to develop a theoretical framework informed and rooted tradition such as Andem contribute to expanding indigenous African epistemology and continue the work of Ethiopian traditional literary scholars in transforming knowledge.

A lack of African digital resources for AI

In the field of AI, natural language processing (NLP) is required to enable machine learning to understand and interpret human language. NLP research has also ushered in a new era of generative AI, particularly through large language models (LLMs). These models enable content creation across domains, including language, image, and various other types of data processing.

Unfortunately, African languages are not well-represented in natural language processing (NLP) because of a lack of digital resources.  It is fortunate for researchers who study Ethiopian traditions of interpretation that the Endagered Archives Programme has digitalised lay bet andemta corpus. These are Ge’ez – Amharic commentary manuscripts of biblical commentaries (approximately 54 manuscripts from 8 personal collections). The study of the Andemta commentary tradition, especially the lay Bet Andemta tradition, had lagged become obsolete due to a lack of material in modern libraries. But it can now be accessed by the public from four libraries including the national archive and library of Ethiopia. The incorporation of the corpus in the digital humanities field also ensures its accessibility for future academic pursuits.

A collaboration to build African language digital collections

I concluded my talk by emphasising the significant risk that AI, if left unchecked, could perpetuate historical power imbalances and continue the misrepresentation of knowledge. I also stressed the urgent need for a concerted effort for African studies scholars and policy makers to collaborate in building African language digital collections of texts (corpora) and to invest in developing Large Language Models (LLMs) specifically for African languages — a continent home to over 2,000 languages. By fostering digital accessibility and linguistic inclusivity we open up new avenues for knowledge creation that are potentially empowering for future generations. This would encourage more scholars to explore indigenous traditions to develop African epistemology as I am currently doing in my PhD thesis.

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