Searching for Meaning in Life and Language Part 4
Volume 1: Birthday Celebrations:
Part 4, Principal Focus
Please use the audio file below to follow along as we go through the texts, tackling this section to better understand the principal focus of this language blog undertaking.
Our main objective is to apply the language postulates above in language learning and language teaching, avoiding the robotic habit of producing, almost always in a frenzy, the known dictionary meanings of either spoken or written words, in interpreting such words. Our overall ambition, even if not fully achieved in Volume 1 of this work, is to establish the equivalence between the author’s original mental pictures behind the linguistic inscriptions formed in real space and real time in Ghanaian English in the English text, and the mental pictures he was producing as he was progressively putting down the inscriptions in Ghanaian French, in a second instance, in the French text. Then, finally, how these two streams of linguistic mental pictures in the two different languages influenced the ones in his mother tongue, in the Akan text, the last text to be produced, in that chronological order.
It goes without saying therefore that we wish to avoid all caricatures of the original mental pictures personally and originally formed in the author’s own mind in that particular brand of English, by ensuring that we are not swayed by the oral or written forms of his thoughts in the other two languages. That is where our equation on language interpretation comes in.
The product of our work is primarily destined for Ghanaians proficient in Akan, the most widely spoken and written Ghanaian language, who are interested in learning to speak and write some basic and acceptable French for personal and general communication, but who may not be very literate in the English language. The target audience is specifically those in that category who may not have the time in their adult lives for any formal learning of the French language in established institutions. That was the reason why the author thought the audiobook would be of prime importance for them, without neglecting the necessity of the written version, for Ghanaians already literate in both Akan and English, who may need some further learning of the French language for the purpose of their own personal practical purposes. We can only be pleased if many other categories of Ghanaians, and even non-Ghanaians, able to find our unorthodox methodology useful, not necessarily for learning French as a foreign language in Ghana, but in recognising anything new and interesting in theoretical and applied linguistics, especially in the theory and practice of translation and interpretation. That is where we hope language professionals, including bilingual secretaries, professional translators, interpreters, editors, journalists, etc. may find this initial attempt of ours worthy of some attention.
