Scholarship | Stanzas | Sacred
This presentation introduces my ongoing project, Crosslingual Memory Archive (CMA), a born-digital archive that curates, aligns, and represents an initial corpus of 136 Western poems and 90 African oral stories across English, Fon, French, and Yoruba.
Continue reading “The Crosslingual Memory Archive as a Decolonial Initiative”
In this study, I examine the challenges faced by Francophone African literary authors, such as Olympe Bhêly-Quénum, in self-translating the haunted, oral “self” into colonial languages. Like most African literary writers, Olympe Bhêly-Quénum enriches his works with African elements that describe his sociocultural background.
Continue reading “From Orality to Ghostliness: Self-Translating the Haunted Self in African Literature”Western Conference on Linguistics—WECOL 2025
In this exploratory study, I aim to provide an overview of Fon language as well as the status of French and English as foreign languages in Benin Republic, and explore the challenges faced by the translator in translating morphosyntactic elements of Fon into French and English, with a view to suggesting strategies for a successful mediation of tonal and morphosyntactic divides for mutual, intercultural understanding and diplomacy between the African and Western languages.
Continue reading “Fon Morphosyntactic Issues in Translation”
In the current study, I investigate the obstacles inherent in translating African tonal languages, focusing on the Beninese Fon, into French. The Fon tonal system, made up of diacritical marks and tonal spelling, complicates the realization of an equitable translation and effective cultural mediation.
Continue reading “Cross-Cultural Communication: Translational Context of African Tonal Languages in the West”
This conference presentation is an adaptation of my M.A. Thesis, 2025.
Continue reading “ON TRANSLATING FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN AUTHORIAL STYLE IN PROSE: HOW TRANSLATORS’ CHOICES AFFECT ENGLISH AUDIENCES”
David Achodo 