Conceptualising Translation Studies: Ethiopia and African Traditions Beyond the Postcolonial Lens

Join us for a talk with Dr Bethlehem Attfield, award-winning literary translator specialising in Amharic and English, as she explores how African translation theories can be expanded beyond the dominant postcolonial paradigm by foregrounding diverse, often overlooked epistemic traditions.

While postcolonial approaches have been crucial in challenging Eurocentric models of translation, they risk flattening African literary and linguistic practices into reactive frameworks defined primarily through colonial encounter.

Focusing in particular on Ethiopia’s long-standing interpretive and translational traditions, the talk highlights precolonial practices as vital resources for rethinking how meaning, authorship, and cultural specificity circulate across languages. These traditions offer alternative models of interpretation that predate colonial frameworks and complicate entrenched binaries such as coloniser/colonised and centre/periphery.

By engaging African intellectual histories on their own terms, the talk proposes a more heterogeneous approach to translation studies that questions Western dominance in theory formation, resists reductive postcolonial categorisations, and encourages epistemological diversity. In doing so, it opens new possibilities for literary translation that more accurately reflect African modes of knowledge production, interpretation, and cultural continuity.

Speaker

Bethlehem Attfield is a literary translator specialising in Amharic and English. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Birmingham. Her debut translated novel, The Lost Spell, was shortlisted for the 2022 TA First Translation Prize by the Society of Authors. In 2023, she received the Global Africa Translation Fellowship Award. She has translated two works by Adam Reta: Requiem for Potatoes (2020) and Couch Grass (2025). 

She is Asymptote Journal’s editor-at-large for Nigeria, and the Community Engagement Coordinator at The Global South Hub. She hosts the podcast 'Journey to Ethiopia with Story', which promotes the translation of Amharic literature, and the 'Decolonising Access' series for the Global South Hub Podcast.

Image (gallery): Dr Bethlehem Attfield

Image (banner): Engin Akyurt, Unsplash