Power and Ideology in South African Translation

"From colonial knowledge extraction through an active professional association in one of the world's most ambitious multilingual policies, translation in South Africa has had an extremely wide-ranging and challenging history. Maricel Botha shows how translation has been used at various times as an instrument of oppression, betrayal, critique and liberation. Resisting simple reductions but pulling no punches, she traces the social complexity of how the various language groups that have interacted through translation. The result is a model of how to trace a complex postcolonial history by looking at translators, and a magisterial demonstration of how systems theory can grasp human drama." --Anthony Pym, Distinguished Professor of Translation and Intercultural Studies, Rovira i Virgili University, Spain and Professor Extraordinary, Stellenbosch University, South Africa