Journal of African Studies and Sustainable Development

This work combines two fields of linguistics and successfully demonstrates how both could complement each other. The field of translation studies is combined with cognitive linguistics to evaluate a translated work. The translation of Chinua Achebe's “Things Fall Apart” into the German language was assessed from the point of view of translation studies and cognitive linguistics. The aim is to assess the German translation and analyse those translation units that are deemed not to replicate the intentions of the author of the source text. It was demonstrated in this work that cognitive linguistics is vital for the comprehension of texts and indispensable in rendering an adequate or equivalent translation. This work compiled a list of questionable choices made by translators and evaluated their choices based on the theories of translation studies and cognitive linguistics. It started with the choice of the translation equivalent of the original title of the novel. The work demonstrated clearly that if the cognitive linguistic notion of image schema had been applied by the translators they would have noticed the semantic differences in their choice of lexical equivalents. It also looked at other translated units which were questionable due to the lack of understanding of the idealized cognitive models of conceptualization peculiar to the source language. It concluded that the translation of the book into German could be viewed as adequate but not accurate when it comes to the translation of specific lexical items that belong to specialized domains.

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