CHARACTERS AND CHARACTERIZATION: AN ONOMASTIC STUDY AND REALIZATION OF TRANSLATION EQUIVALENCE ON NAMES IN ABDULLAHI’S GANDUN DABBOBI

Abstract

The main thrust of this work is to unveil the translation patterns of names of characters in Abdullahi’s Gandun Dabbobi-GD, a Hausa translated version of Orwell’s Animal Farm. The conviction, here, is also to set off the possibility of how the two textual materials achieve unity or mediate meaning of the translated names. And whether or not the character’s roles determine their translated names or vice versa. Thus, the bulk of the data is from GD and its English original version-AF. This gives a clear picture of the characters in the characterization. To execute this investigation, the researcher used the features of Nida’s Equivalence Theory which specify how two or more texts gain correspondence in terms of forms and in meaning. This renders the work partly linguistic and partly translation, as the two concepts are isomorphic when they involve working together. The research discloses that Abdullahi’s naming system is unique and strategic and achieves weak equivalence on one to one correspondence of the original text names, or on the ground of physical nature or on attitudinal quality of the characters but on their role ascription.