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Demarginalising Orature – Translating Minor Forms into the Digital Age (WiSe 22/23)
Introduction In the winter term of 2022/23, I participated in the ‘Demarginalising Orature’ seminar, organised and held by Dr. Eva Ulrike Pirker, Tasun Tidorchibe and Jana Mankau. The seminar aims at “decolonizing knowledge and making knowledge (and primary materials) from a Global South context available in a responsible way” [1]. We, the participants, were “introduced […]
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Introduction to video editing and subtitling
Hello everyone!In this post I’m going to tell you a little bit about our last “Demarginalising Orature” session. As you may have guessed from the title, we talked about and worked on video editing and especially subtitling. In the past few weeks we have learned about Konkomba folktales, language and culture, we have worked with […]
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Guest Lecture on The Sɩsaala Dirge by Dr. Confidence Gbolo Sanka
Introduction Last week we listened to a lecture about Ghanaian funerals by Dr. Sanka. The lecture was mainly focused on the nature and qualities of the Sɩsaala dirges as well as answering what exactly makes them literary. What is a Sɩsaala Dirge? The Sɩsaala dirge is a versified expression of grief specific to the Sɩsaala […]
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Aesthetics of Konkomba folktales
The issue of library catalogues and classification We started the session by discussing this question: In which category can we sort Konkomba folktales? We watched a video of one such folktale. The storyteller uses gestures, imitates sounds, sings alone and with the audience, and uses intonation to create drama. So, which category fits the Konkomba […]
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The Homestretch of our TEI Introduction
Last week we finished our introduction to TEI and started our group work of this semester. TEI Introduction III For the TEI part of the class we dealt with common mishaps that occurred in our TEI documents of the folktale “Why the Python’s Skin has Dark-Brown Blotches” which we worked on the week before. None […]
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Guest Lecture
As translators, folklorists, literary scholars and academics, we continue to grapple with documeting, translating and studying indigenous orature – be it their textual, oral and/or performance aspects. In the context of our seminar, Demarginalising Orature: Translating Minor Forms into the Digital Age, we present the guest lecture, “Indigenous Oral Performance: The Aesthetics, Documentation and Translation […]
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[Addendum] Folktales, language and culture
Introduction Hello everyone! This blog entry was meant to be published a while ago – sorry for the delay! Luckily, Anne also published a blog entry on that lesson of the “Demarginalising Orature – Translating minor forms into the digital age” seminar. I hope you have all read it, it was very informative and I […]
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Introduction to TEI and its header
In our session on November 3rd, we were introduced to the technological side of the course and one of its key goals: to create TEI documents of the Kokomba folktales. What is TEI? TEI is an XML-based format especially used for encoding texts of the humanities, such as poetry, drama, or registers of persons, but […]
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Folktales: On the Preservation of Culture and Language
In our last session in the course “Demarginalising Orature – Translating minor forms into the digital age” we talked a lot about culture and language, their relation to folktales, and also how important folktales are in order to preserve them. Almost every folktale comes from an oral source, having been passed down through generations by […]
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Visual Narratives – Subtitling a Recording of a Konkomba Folktale
When reading folktales that have rarely been written down before, it is important to keep their origin in mind. Konkomba folktales have been passed on orally for a long time and have only recently been written down and translated from Likpakpaln into English. Storytelling in the Konkomba’s culture takes place in a very specific way […]
translating minor forms