The pragmatics of reduplication: Implications for translating

One area that cannot be overlooked when it comes to translating from a foreign language into an African language is its morphology. In this paper, we discuss one of the most pervasive morphological phenomena in African languages – reduplication. The article seeks to examine which structures in English are translatable as reduplicates in Dagaare, a Gur language of West Africa. It is an attempt at departing from the conventional morphosyntactic perspective to a pragmatic/translation perspective. Basically, we consider reduplication as a morphological process with certain grammatical functions such as plurarity, intensification, iteration and augmentation. As instances of reduplication from actual translations into Dagaare from English are examined, attention will be paid to a possible difference between uses of reduplication that have become grammaticalised so that the meaning is not modified in context; and uses which may be said to convey some general procedural information to be developed further by means of inferential processing, for instance, some heightened value of some quality or quantity or event referred to. The analysis will be done within the framework of Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory of communication. It is hoped this research will help shed more light on this interestingly pervasive but inadequately researched area of Pragmatics.