Bissau in translation. Mishaps and challenges of an ongoing research (Atena Editora)

Abstract

This article is an excerpt of thirteen months of research carried out in Bissau, capital of Guinea-Bissau, located in West Africa, on translation zone (SIMON, 2013) and translation space (CRONIN; SIMON 2014) in transnational contexts. From the quest to understand the effects caused by translation practices in multilingual, multicultural, multiethnic and multireligious contexts, this text presents the translation spaces of Bissau from the perspective of the history of cultural translation with a decolonial bias. The theoretical approach in relation to cultural translation is developed in the perspectives of Simon (2008) and Pym (2017), highlighting the conceptual basis of cultural translation by Bhabha (2014). Regarding the methodology, the research reconciles different procedures for generating and collecting data in line with oral history, taking as a space-time cut the space of translation and the place of memory of the “Praça dos Heróis Nacionais”, located in the central region of the capital, from February 2021 to March 2022. About the methodology in oral history, I spoke with the perspectives of Meihy (2011), Freitas (2006), Meihy and Ribeiro (2011) and Seawrigt (2017) in order to weave necessary resources to define the types of interviews and the stages of the interviews to be carried out. With the fieldwork, I present some interview clippings provided by our research collaborators, aiming to describe how the concept of cultural translation only makes sense when cultural differences and multiple negotiation processes are discussed. In conclusion, I present the main mishaps and challenges encountered during the implementation of the research in Bissau, the transcultural capital of West Africa.