Papers by G. Edzordzi Agbozo
Technical Communication
Purpose: This study re-examines contemporary localization theory to understand the shortcomings o... more Purpose: This study re-examines contemporary localization theory to understand the shortcomings of the theory using the case of a state-sponsored postcolonial technology localization project. I call for centering the analysis of the power reticulations in context-specific technology localization. Method: I engaged in extensive review of existing research on the subject and conducted ethnographic and digital surveys with users and non-users of the technology I studied. This method provided nuanced perspectives on technology localization for a grounded user experience analysis. Results: Against current theoretical assumptions that support localization in user contexts as the solution to the chasm between developer culture and user culture, I argue that the reticular nature of power and developers' neglect of users' geo-epistemology also create a chasm within localization at users' sites. Conclusion: We need to examine the complex work of power in user contexts as part of a...
Anglisticum Journal, 2015
The past decades of human existence were draped with varied experiences: some serene and others h... more The past decades of human existence were draped with varied experiences: some serene and others horrifying. Writers make efforts as the conscience of humanity, to speak to the different human experiences that dawned on the world. In the face of horrifying histories and current international upheavals, some writers call for reconciliation and universal harmony. This paper explores how two contemporary Ghanaian poets try to advocate global coexistence in their works as well as suggest processes of healing and reconciliation worldwide. This study is carried out to add to the corpus of work on universal harmony, especially from the African/Ghanaian writing/cultural worldview. Keywords: Acquah, Anyidoho, Ghana, poetry, reconciliation.
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2020
Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press... more Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:
Current Issues in Language Planning, 2019
This paper explores, at the micro level, the sociolinguistic backgrounds of teacher trainees in a... more This paper explores, at the micro level, the sociolinguistic backgrounds of teacher trainees in a College of Education in Accra and their perceptions toward Ghana's current language-ineducation policy. It aims at finding how these micro-level sociolinguistic insights could provide suggestions for language-ineducation policies at the macro level. This paper argues that the disparities between policy and practice that have occurred in language-in-education policy partly stem from the possible neglect of the multilingual realities of Ghana in the formulation and implementation of the policies. Being a multilingual country, the recognition of a need for a language (or languages) of communication, and a need to select one or more languages for official purposes are crucial in the language planning activities. The linguistic backgrounds of the teacher trainees and their repertoires illustrate the high level of bilingualism and multilingualism in the country. Although a preliminary survey, we propose a flexible bilingual language-in-education policy to address the linguistic complexities of Ghana. We suggest a bottom-up approach for soliciting inputs toward a macro-level policy.
Research on Humanities and Social Sciences, 2014
What are the quintessential linguistic features of translations in African writing? This is the q... more What are the quintessential linguistic features of translations in African writing? This is the question we attempt to answer in this paper. We undertake this task because there are evidences that African writing contains lots of translations and these bilingual/hybrid texts are very often discussed from a more political/ideological/birds-eye perspective. Since translation is a linguistic phenomenon, it is necessary that they are analyzed using linguistic approaches. We analyzed the translation of proverbs from the source language (Ewe) into the target language (English) in Mawuli Adzei's novel Taboo. We used the Vinay and Darbelnet's Model in translation theory for the study. Our findings show some linguistic features and the stylistic processes of translations evident in this novel.
Multicultural Shakespeare, 2018
The cultural turn in translation theory brought attention to the idea that translation is not a p... more The cultural turn in translation theory brought attention to the idea that translation is not a purely linguistic phenomenon but one that is also constrained by culture. The cultural turn considers translation as a rewriting of an original text. In this paper, I attempt to find reflections of the cultural turn in a translation into an African language. As such, the paper reads William Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the Ewe language of West Africa, Shakespeare ʄe Makbet, as rewriting. Walter Blege is the translator and the Bureau of Ghana Languages is the publisher of the target text meant for Ewe language audience in Ghana. The target text is for learning and acquiring the Ewe language especially in the area of developing reading comprehension skills. Following Andre Lefevere and Jeremy Munday, this paper suggests that Shakespeare ʄe Makbet is a rewritten text as it follows some cultural constraints in its translation. The study provides insight into the motivations for some of the transl...
Proverbs and wise sayings in most cultures, though grounded in anonymity and communal authorship,... more Proverbs and wise sayings in most cultures, though grounded in anonymity and communal authorship, have often been ascribed to sagacious old people from antiquity. Most studies on Ghanaian pidgin, a fast emerging area of scholarship, particularly Student Pidgin (SP), focus mainly on vocabulary, syntax and grammar, among other features. However, there is a growing body of proverbs in SP discourse which is not attracting interest among linguistic scholars and discourse analysts. This study fills the gap by presenting a sizeable corpus of SP proverbs and wise sayings which are analysed in the sociolinguistic domains in which they are generated, the diverse communication contexts in which they are deployed, taking into account their linguistic and literary qualities. The outcomes show that most of the proverbs are based on existing ones, allude to specific persons and phenomena while maintaining their uniqueness through the contexts of use. We then call for attention to this aspect of SP...
By some strange geographic co-incidence, or by divine-conspiracy, if you may, two of Ghana’s most... more By some strange geographic co-incidence, or by divine-conspiracy, if you may, two of Ghana’s most celebrated poets, Kofi Awoonor and Kofi Anyidoho, and new poetic icon, Mawuli Adzei, hail from the Wheta Traditional Area. Thoroughly grounded in the artistic traditions of the Wheta area, they use their poetry to narrate Ghana’s social trauma of the 20th and 21st centuries. For the established and internationally acclaimed duo, as well as the budding complement of the trio, the concept of ‘home’ means much more than where one’s birth-cord is buried. While some literary scholars have succinctly observed the recurrence of ‘home’ in the poetry of Awoonor and Anyidoho, not much attention has been paid to it in the poetry of Adzei and though the concept of ‘home’ has been identified in the works of Awoonor and Anyidoho, there is the dearth of a systematic scholarship on the divergent interpretations of ‘home’ with regards to Awoonor as Agbozo’s (2012) study on Anyidoho. Through critical rea...
Advances in Religious and Cultural Studies
In this chapter, the authors investigated how ideological differences between the two main politi... more In this chapter, the authors investigated how ideological differences between the two main political traditions in Ghana manifested in their campaign lyrics. The authors diachronically interrogated the 2012 and 2016 campaign songs of the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party of Ghana using critical discourse analysis. The findings suggest that there are no clear manifestations of ideological differences between the two political traditions in their campaign songs. The songs had pragmatic themes that essentially dwelt on the lived socio-economic conditions of the voters. As such, these daily economic needs of the voters became the defining concerns in political campaign songs rather than ideological affinity.
Applied Linguistics Review
In Ghana, plurilingual language use is the norm rather than the exception. It follows that the mu... more In Ghana, plurilingual language use is the norm rather than the exception. It follows that the multilingual linguistic practices of bilingual and multilingual Ghanaians should be reflected in language planning and languages-in-education policies. The study explores the nature of Ghana’s complex sociolinguistic ecology and details the shifts in language-in-education policies from the colonial era to the present. A closer look at the policies presents two opposing models: policies that draw on monolingual ideologies involving the use of English only as a medium of instruction from pre-school to higher levels, and policies that promote a bilingual approach where Ghanaian indigenous languages and English are used concurrently in the lower grade classes (grades 1–3), with a transition to English-only instruction from grade 4 onwards. The paper argues that instabilities in languages-in-education policies occur through the effects of ideology and policy formulation that do not take into ac...
In this paper I discuss how I used the technics of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to guid... more In this paper I discuss how I used the technics of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to guide students’ critical engagement with technical writing and design project for transnational/international/global context. I describe the motivation for this pedagogy, students’ learning activities, and digital project. I then discuss some outcomes from this class as well as implications for technical and professional communication. Although I currently discuss results from one face-to-face classroom at this stage, I show the possibility of an experiment to integrate critical approaches into our pedagogy in an effort to guide students’ conscientiousness about transnational/international/global contexts.
ABSTRACT By some strange geographic co-incidence, or by divine-conspiracy, if you may, two of Gha... more ABSTRACT By some strange geographic co-incidence, or by divine-conspiracy, if you may, two of Ghana’s most celebrated poets, Kofi Awoonor and Kofi Anyidoho, and new poetic icon, Mawuli Adzei, hail from the Wheta Traditional Area. Thoroughly grounded in the artistic traditions of the Wheta area, they use their poetry to narrate Ghana’s social trauma of the 20th and 21st centuries. For the established and internationally acclaimed duo, as well as the budding complement of the trio, the concept of ‘home’ means much more than where one’s birth-cord is buried. While some literary scholars have succinctly observed the recurrence of ‘home’ in the poetry of Awoonor and Anyidoho, not much attention has been paid to it in the poetry of Adzei and though the concept of ‘home’ has been identified in the works of Awoonor and Anyidoho, there is the dearth of a systematic scholarship on the divergent interpretations of ‘home’ with regards to Awoonor as Agbozo’s (2012) study on Anyidoho. Through critical reading and analysis, this paper explores the metaphoric use of ‘home’ together with its associated themes and motifs in the works of these three “Whetaphile” poets: Awoonor, Anyidoho and Adzei. The paper also explores some diagnosis they offered to the traumas of history and the prescriptive burdens they have left on the voice of the budding poet and young artists, as an invitation to the continuation of the dialogue.
Journal Current Issues in Language Planning, 2019
This paper explores, at the micro level, the sociolinguistic backgrounds of teacher trainees in a... more This paper explores, at the micro level, the sociolinguistic backgrounds of teacher trainees in a College of Education in Accra and their perceptions toward Ghana’s current language-in-education policy. It aims at finding how these micro-level sociolinguistic insights could provide suggestions for language-in-education policies at the macro level. This paper argues that the disparities between policy and practice that have occurred in language-in-education policy partly stem from the possible neglect of the multilingual realities of Ghana in the formulation and implementation of the policies. Being a multilingual country, the recognition of a need for a language (or languages) of communication, and a need to select one or more languages for official purposes are crucial in the language planning activities. The linguistic backgrounds of the teacher trainees and their repertoires illustrate the high level of bilingualism and multilingualism in the country. Although a preliminary survey, we propose a flexible bilingual language-in-education policy to address the linguistic complexities of Ghana. We suggest a bottom-up approach for soliciting inputs toward a macro-level policy.
Music and Messaging in African Political Arena, 2019
In this chapter, the authors investigated how ideological differences between the two main politi... more In this chapter, the authors investigated how ideological differences between the two main political traditions in Ghana manifested in their campaign lyrics. The authors diachronically interrogated the 2012 and 2016 campaign songs of the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party of Ghana using critical discourse analysis. The findings suggest that there are no clear manifestations of ideological differences between the two political traditions in their campaign songs. The songs had pragmatic themes that essentially dwelt on the lived socioeconomic conditions of the voters. As such, these daily economic needs of the voters became the defining concerns in political campaign songs rather than ideological affinity.
The cultural turn in translation theory brought attention to the idea that translation is not a p... more The cultural turn in translation theory brought attention to the idea that translation is not a purely linguistic phenomenon but one that is also constrained by culture. The cultural turn considers translation as a rewriting of an original text. In this paper, I attempt to find reflections of the cultural turn in a translation into an African language. As such, the paper reads William Shakespeare's Macbeth in the Ewe language of West Africa, Shakespeare ʄe Makbet, as rewriting. Walter Blege is the translator and the Bureau of Ghana Languages is the publisher of the target text meant for Ewe language audience in Ghana. The target text is for learning and acquiring the Ewe language especially in the area of developing reading comprehension skills. Following Andre Lefevere and Jeremy Munday, this paper suggests that Shakespeare ʄe Makbet is a rewritten text as it follows some cultural constraints in its translation. The study provides insight into the motivations for some of the translator/rewriter's choices. Given the less attention paid to the Ewe language and many other African languages, the paper proposes translation as a socio-psychological tool for revitalizing interest in the learning and acquisition of African and other lesser-known languages.
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Papers by G. Edzordzi Agbozo