Abstract
There is something deeply unsettling about the idea that a survivor’s most painful words, wrung out of lived suffering, might arrive in another language stripped of the very weight that made them true. Translation has always carried this risk, but nowhere does it feel more urgent, or more ethically charged, than in the rendering of trauma narratives. When a person speaks from the site of their wound, their language does not simply communicate but performs, fractures, hesitates, and sometimes breaks altogether. These are not stylistic accidents; they are the testimony itself. This paper examined the aesthetic and linguistic challenges that arise when trauma testimonies are translated across languages, with particular attention to how the formal and emotional textures of survivor speech resist conventional translation strategies. The central question guiding this inquiry is: To what extent do existing translation frameworks adequately account for the aesthetic dimensions of trauma testimony, and where do they fall short? The problem, as this paper argued, is not merely technical but philosophical and ethical. When translators prioritize fluency over fidelity, or cultural equivalence over experiential authenticity, something of the witness is lost and, with it, a portion of the historical and human record. Drawing on insights from translation studies, trauma theory, and linguistics, the paper examined the intersection of these fields to propose a more nuanced understanding of what it means to translate not just words, but wounds.
Keywords: Trauma narratives, Testimonial translation, Linguistic boundaries, Aesthetic fidelity, Translation ethics
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21215388
Authors:
Dr. Dominica E. Ukpong
Department of Foreign
Languages
University of Uyo
ORCID: 009-0002-4730-3407.Tx
Dr. Boniface Umana I.
Department of Foreign
Languages
University of Uyo
bonifaceumana@gmail.com
Dr. Mamina Mba Ndifon
Department of Foreign
Languages and Diplomatic
Studies
University of Calabar
maminandifon@gmail.com
Copyright © [2026] The Author(s). Published by the Journal of People and Worldviews (JPW). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are properly credited.