Page 122 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
Our original plan was simply to translate entries from the currently most prestigious philosophy dictionary – the Oxford Dictionary
of Philosophy – as the shortest route to proof of concept.
meaningful. For instance, Kwasi Wiredu has shown how many central philosophical concepts in English differ so dramatically in African languages such as Akan, that certain core philosophical problems in Anglo-American philosophy are simply nonsensical in Akan (Wiredu 1992).
Thus, any attempt to decolonise academia without decolonising the languages in which we teach and research is doomed to fail. Having a dictionary of the kind we are compiling is a necessary first step in the linguistic decolonisation of philosophy.
Because we designed this as a capacity-building project, our translation team comprises philosophy postgraduates whom we have given formal translation training (with UJ’s very own UJ Multilingual Language Services Office). They thus combine the philosophical skills necessary for ensuring the theoretical richness and accuracy of the translations, with the technical translation skills necessary for carrying this out. Each entry gets translated by one member
of this team, back-translated by another and quality-checked by a third. This ensures uniformity in the translation style. In the future, we hope to further streamline this process through using software8 that will allow us to build an extensive philosophy glossary and corpus.
What we have learnt about decolonising
philosophy so far
Our original plan was simply to translate entries from the currently most prestigious philosophy dictionary – the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
– as the shortest route to proof of concept. But this soon turned out to
be misguided. It first hit us when one of our translators commented that
she was puzzled by why we were translating mainstream Anglo-American philosophical concepts in a project that was supposedly laying the foundations for decolonising philosophy. When we shared this comment with the rest of the translation team, it turned out that they all had similar misgivings. One
of them pointed to her translation of the entry on the distinction between science and pseudo-science: ‘Everything that my people do,’ she said, ‘turns out to be pseudo-science by the definitions you are having me translate.’
This made us realise that the original design of the pilot was crucially
flawed. We had chosen the Oxford Dictionary as the quickest route to
proof of concept. But what we were doing instead was reaffirming the
West’s unwarranted hegemonic authority to pronounce what counts as real knowledge and what doesn’t. That is, we were in fact reinforcing the very intellectual colonisation that the dictionary was supposed to redress! This was a frightening wake-up call to us, so we switched to piloting the project through encyclopaedia entries and articles by African philosophers.
But the project has been a multidimensional source of insights about how decolonising South African academia should unfold. For example, a third translator recently complained that by requesting that the translations of the entries be as colloquial and accessible to city-dwelling students as possible, we were asking him to write ‘pidgin isiZulu’ and thus undermining the dignity
8 We aim to use Autshumato, an open-source computer-assisted translation tool, which streamlines the translation process by allowing translators to merge previous translations to memory as well as build glossaries into projects.