Power and Ideology in South African Translation

“From colonial knowledge extraction through an active professional association in one of the world’s most ambitious multilingual policies, translation in South Africa has had an extremely wide-ranging and challenging history. Maricel Botha shows how translation has been used at various times as an instrument of oppression, betrayal, critique and liberation. Resisting simple reductions but pulling no punches, she traces the social complexity of how the various language groups that have interacted through translation. The result is a model of how to trace a complex postcolonial history by looking at translators, and a magisterial demonstration of how systems theory can grasp human drama.” --Anthony Pym, Distinguished Professor of Translation and Intercultural Studies, Rovira i Virgili University, Spain and Professor Extraordinary, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
This book provides a social interpretation of written South African translation history from the seventeenth century to the present, considering how trends involving various languages have reflected ideologies and unequal power relations and focusing attention on translation’s often hidden social operation. Translation is investigated in relation to colonial mercantilism, scientific knowledge of extraction, Christian missionary conversion, Islamic education, various nationalisms, apartheid oppression and the anti-apartheid struggle, neoliberalism, exclusion and post-apartheid social transformation by employing Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. This book will be an essential resource for scholars, graduate students, and general readers who are interested in or work on the history and practice of translation and its cultural agents in the South African context. 
Maricel Botha is Senior Lecturer at North-West University, South Africa. She completed her doctorate in applied linguistics and literary theory with a focus on translation sociology and has taughtvarious graduate translation courses and academic literacy since 2015.