Translations as Sources for African History

Abstract

Translations ought not to serve as sources for academic research. This precept is an ideal which has today become quite unattainable in many fields, notably in the natural sciences and medicine. In the human sciences it is still widely operative (at least tacitly), yet here too it is increasingly becoming Utopian. For any scholar of German literature, of course, command of the German language is (and, one hopes, will remain) an essential prerequisite: a treatise on Goethe's Faust based on a translation of this work could scarcely be taken seriously. Likewise it should be expected of classical historians that they study their Greek and Latin sources in the original language. The question becomes more problematic, however, when we consider the citation of modern pieces of research and other secondary literature. Admittedly, the majority of studies are still published in one of the major world languages, and it is possible to get by with a command of two or three modern languages (e.g. with English and French, with Russian and English, or with Arabic and French). But the internationalization of research is gaining ground steadily. A book written in Japanese on, say, the history of South America has little prospect of coming to the notice of western historians unless it is made accessible to them in translation, in this instance probably in Spanish, Portuguese, or English (leaving aside as a rare exception the historian with an above-average flair for languages).