Conceptualising Translation Studies: Ethiopia and African Traditions Beyond

Join us for a talk with Dr Bethlehem Attfield, award-winning literary translator specialising in Amharic and English, as she explores how African translation theories can be expanded beyond the dominant postcolonial paradigm by foregrounding diverse, often overlooked epistemic traditions.

While postcolonial approaches have been crucial in challenging Eurocentric models of translation, they risk flattening African literary and linguistic practices into reactive frameworks defined primarily through colonial encounter.

Focusing in particular on Ethiopia’s long-standing interpretive and translational traditions, the talk highlights precolonial practices as vital resources for rethinking how meaning, authorship, and cultural specificity circulate across languages. These traditions offer alternative models of interpretation that predate colonial frameworks and complicate entrenched binaries such as coloniser/colonised and centre/periphery.

By engaging African intellectual histories on their own terms, the talk proposes a more heterogeneous approach to translation studies that questions Western dominance in theory formation, resists reductive postcolonial categorisations, and encourages epistemological diversity. In doing so, it opens new possibilities for literary translation that more accurately reflect African modes of knowledge production, interpretation, and cultural continuity.

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Host or Publisher The Centre of African Studies, the Royal African Society and the SOAS China Institute