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Paper short abstract:

Africa opens to globalization, seeking political awareness and greater respect; gains in linguistic competences open discourses to articulate the intellectual and political concerns of African communities. Translation should stay faithful to information conveyed while communicating it to readers. 

Paper long abstract:

I will present my self-reflexive work and translational challenges I experienced while cataloging and converting archived documents, from the now-folded NGO Safe Blood for Africa (SFBA), into an open access database. I translated training and operations documents used by the Cameroon blood service (in partnership with SFBA) from Cameroonian French to English to prepare metadata and keywords for the searchable database. When identifying metadata in these documents I encountered terms that did not have direct translation with meaning that fit the context, and thus I made choices as to how I interpreted them.  For example did use of French “politique” mean in English “policy,” “politics,” “approach,” or possibly “doctrine?” Relying on my own educational and cultural background I chose “policy.” Interpretive, but not arbitrary. These terms, however, are important for blood transfusion safety, and my role as translator was going to affect information needed by researchers and practitioners and thus directly impacts safety of people in which these protocols are applied to. My interpretive choices were influenced by my U.S. training in biochemistry, statistics, and public health.  My positionality (as a French woman), in the global health work centered around the African context, provided insights into the interactions between translation, language, and the work of decolonization.  It also challenged me to confront the limits of translation for decolonization within the context of blood services. This paper will aim to discuss how I negotiated honoring the words while working through my influences to perform response-able translation.