African Cultural and Literary Specificity in the Broad Translation Quality Debate

Beyond revisiting the byzantine and seemingly inconclusive debate on translation quality assurance and assessment, this article investigates the extent of an across-the-board applicability of existing quality assessment frameworks to the broad translation quality debate, against a strong backdrop of culture-specificity. It, first and foremost, exemplifies cultural and literary specificity through linguistically open-ended African creative writing, examines the variegated concept of translation, the volatile concept of translation quality assurance and assessment, outlines constraints to the assurance and assessment of this translation quality, and importantly portrays the preponderant place of metrics, rubrics and models in quality assurance and assessment. Secondly and finally, using a blend of literary and translation theories and strategies, it then qualitatively demonstrates from existing evidence, that quality assurance with its acquiesced formulae will continue to be at the mercy of incontestable contextualised cultural specificity – being of necessity a ‘provincialised’ and ‘balkanised’ activity.