IGBO VERBS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TRANSLATION

Far from being an entirely textual engagement, translation is a completely intellectual enterprise. Some translation practitioners and theorists have perhaps erroneously tended to postulate that translation involves the mere replacement of lexicons in one language with lexicons in another language. This position has led to the concept of source language text (SLT) and target language (TLT). In this article, we are not in any way condemning the idea of translation constituting a linguistic movement from one culture to another. All we intend to demonstrate is that our research so far shows that translating between languages of little or no cultural affinity is not as simple as people may think. The Igbo language has no cultural affinity with English and French. This singular fact translates them to an uphill task. The Igbo verb presents a difficult problem to translators working between Igbo and foreign languages, especially English.