Translating oral literature: Aboriginal song texts

Abstract

This essay discusses what is involved in making oral literature in Australian languages, especially songs, accessible to speakers of English. It offers a variety of linguistic, technical and above all historical and cultural reasons why so little has been attempted, and why so few of the attempts have been successful. In the course of the essay, I introduce a sprinkling of examples from an extensive oral literature whose full range remains unknown, and whose particular regional traditions are for the most part disappearing as the number of knowledgeable practitioners dwindles. My hope is that these examples will arouse interest in the creation of more and better 'translations', in the sense developed here. The Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia first felt the impact of European invasion between the later eighteenth century and the early twentieth century. Before this invasion the Aborigines of mainland Australia numbered somewhere in the region of 300,000. Between them they probably spoke more than two hundred different languages.1 Most of these languages had a variety of named dialects, and one way in which people identified themselves was as 'owning' a dialect (or sometimes more than one) by virtue of their descent.2 Calculation of the number of distinct languages spoken over the continent is complicated by difficulties attaching to the use of the terms 'language' and 'dialect', as well as by the small amount of surviving information about some areas. Varieties of speech recognised socially as being different might or might not be closely related in terms of shared grammatical characteristics or mutual intelligibility. Acquaintance with more than one language was a familiar feature of Aboriginal life. Marriage frequently linked speakers of different languages, and children regularly grew up with knowledge of languages other than the first they learned to speak. In some areas there were also special sub languages which had to be used in the presence of certain relatives, or on secret ceremonial occasions.