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Abstract

This essay aims to embody the thoughts and reflections that have emerged during my ongoing translation of Arinze Ifeakandu’s short story collection “God’s Children are Little Broken Things”. Drawing from my initial translation of the titular short story in 2020, I reflect on a few translational aspects, including italicization, the norms and conventions of translating Nigerian Pidgin, and how these differ from those of English, and lastly the translator’s distress. In the chapter addressing italicization, I reevaluate my decision to italicize Nigerian Pidgin discourse markers and consider the nuanced and not-so-nuanced meanings that italicization might convey in different situations and literatures. In the subsequent chapter, I discuss the complexities of translating Nigerian Pidgin, it being both semantically and grammatically close to standardized English, and how to convey this similarity in the translation so as not to undercut the importance of the characters’ code-switching. In this discussion, I also reflect on the relationship between the author’s stylistics and strictly linguistic norms, and question whether it, as per Swedish translational norms, is respectful to keep features from the original untranslated, or if this in fact is an act of exotification. Lastly, I explore the translators’ identity and distress, focusing on how this very distress can foster a self-awareness and responsiveness to knowledge gaps and lack of experience, which allows the translator to identify the need for research and/or asking for advice.