Ideological Mediation in Nigerian Bible Translation: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Igbo and Hausa Versions

Bible translation is never ideologically neutral, as the choices translators make in rendering source text into receptor language inevitably reflect and reinforce assumptions about gender, authority, community, and cosmology that may diverge significantly from those of source text communities or contemporary target language communities. This dissertation analyses ideological mediation in Nigerian Bible translation, specifically examining the Igbo Union Version and the Hausa Bible in relation to their Greek and Hebrew source texts and their social and cultural contexts of reception. Theoretical foundations draw on critical translation studies, discourse analysis, and postcolonial theology to develop an original analytical framework termed translational ideology critique that specifies the dimensions along which translational choices encode and transmit ideological assumptions. The empirical programme analyses three hundred parallel text segments drawn from four thematic domains with high ideological loading: gender role constructions, political authority representations, community organization language, and cosmological terminology. Contrastive analysis between source texts, intermediary English translations, and Igbo and Hausa target texts uses Fairclough's discourse analysis toolkit applied to the specific demands of cross-linguistic text comparison. Findings document systematic patterns of patriarchal amplification in gender reference translation in both versions, with the Igbo version showing more frequent feminization of negative agency constructions and the Hausa version showing more systematic replacement of egalitarian source text kinship terms with hierarchically differentiated Hausa alternatives. Cosmological terminology choices reflect nineteenth-century missionary theological assumptions about indigenous religious concepts that persist in both versions. The dissertation makes contributions to translation studies, postcolonial religious linguistics, and Nigerian intellectual history. Keywords: Bible translation, ideological mediation, critical discourse analysis, Igbo, Hausa.