Challenges and Opportunities in Translating Yoruba Oral Literature into German: A Translation Studies Perspective

This study examines the challenges and opportunities inherent in translating Yoruba oral literary texts into German, drawing on case studies of selected praise poems (oriki), proverbs, and narrative folk tales sourced from Oyo and Ekiti states, South West Nigeria. The translation of oral literature across typologically and culturally distant language pairs raises fundamental questions about fidelity, cultural representation, and the politics of textual mediation. While Yoruba oral literature has attracted significant scholarly attention within Nigeria, its transmission into German for academic, literary, and cultural exchange purposes remains a marginal practice. The study employs a translation studies analytical framework drawing on concepts of cultural equivalence, domestication, foreignisation, and the performance dimension of oral texts. A corpus of ten translated texts by four professional Nigerian-German translators is analysed alongside original source texts and translator commentary gathered through structured interviews. Findings reveal that lexical gaps, performance-embedded meaning, tonal humour, and culturally specific referential systems are the primary sources of translation difficulty. Translators adopt varying strategies, with a tendency towards foreignisation in academic contexts and domestication in literary contexts. The study contributes to African oral literature translation studies and provides practical guidelines for future Yoruba-German translation projects. Keywords: Yoruba oral literature, translation into German, translation studies, domestication, Oyo State.