This week, I don’t
think any of my schoolwork proceeded along particularly well. I tried to
implement a system of self-care in order to cope with the election news, but I
don’t think I am through processing yet. It hits me in utterly destabilizing waves,
in which I come face-to-face with the recognition that he is going to be our president for the next four to eight years
and what that means for me- what kind
of impact his presidency will have on area studies and on federally funded
fellowships, and what it will mean for my personal relationships. Then, I have
to think of what it will mean for those around me- my classmates, my colleagues,
and, yes, Africans, more generally, and Rwandans, in particular-, and the
thought, though completely necessary to bear in mind, is almost crippling.
With that said,
I tried to follow my routine this week, with some amount of fallback. Indeed,
for the past few weeks, I have been attempting to translate the Kinyarwanda
Bible into English, approximately one book a week. I made the choice to do
this, because it was a resource available to me, and I had a ready English
translation to confirm my work. I’m still not sure it’s the most effective
choice, however, likely due to the fact that the vocabulary used isn’t what I
would otherwise come into contact with. I also have Ntihazasigare N’Uwo Kubara Inkuru, which
is a Kinyarwanda translation of Allison DesForges’ English text, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in
Rwanda, that I could work with, and it is more relevant to my research.
Last semester, I tried to read various sections in order to get an “idea” of
what it meant, but now as I am potentially preparing to travel to Rwanda and
Tanzania, in order to conduct archival research, I recognize that I will likely
have to do a fair amount of translation in order to include it in my
scholarship, and it’s a skill I am now interested in practicing.
To that end, I
also made an effort to listen to testimony about the genocide, making sure to
ignore the English subtitles (at least during the first viewing). I haven’t
always adhered to this practice, but I recognize that it makes sense to do so,
so I tried to write down words that I was unfamiliar with in order to look them
up later. Sometimes I could find them. Sometimes I couldn’t, but now I have a
working list to ask my language partner, J, about.
In addition, a
new practice I started last week was to contribute Kinyarwanda translations to
Google Translate. So far, I have contributed 27 translations to the site, and
that makes me feel measurably productive. Also, I definitely understand why one
of my classmates, L, might enjoy a point-based system of language study. L, I
get it now! J However, I have a few critiques of the
Google Translate structure. The first, as I have discussed with my professor
and classmates, is that it asks me to translate ridiculous things that probably
wouldn’t be fully translated into Kinyarwanda, such as “suit up” or “Gangnam Style.”
It also is a little unclear sometimes what they want you to translate. For
instance, they asked me to translate “turn around,” which I took to mean the
imperative tense, but I hope they don’t think that they can merely put a first
person pronoun before the verb and it be correct (i.e. I “turn around”). In any
case, I can now see why Google Translate is not a perfect structure. In
addition, though the site offers a generous amount of space for multiple
translations, it doesn’t offer enough to account for all of Kinyarwanda’s noun
classes and the agreement rules that accompany them. I can’t remember the
phrase in which I ran into an issue, but I think it involved the word “it,” and
depending on what noun class the “it” belonged to, it could be any number of
translations. So, I tried to insert them all, but the site only provided me
five spaces, when I needed ten.
Anyway, back to
my studies. Even if African Cultural Studies isn’t even on his radar, I can imagine that by participating in it, I am a thorn
in his awful, orange, scaly side, and I like that. It gives me (slightly
petulant) purpose. Plus, it certainly incentivizes women’s studies as a prospect
as well…
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