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Record W2479980294 · doi:10.1075/btl.81.10ban

Cheikh Anta Diop: Translation at the service of history

2009· book-chapter· en· W2479980294 on OpenAlexaff
Paul F. Bandia

Bibliographic record

VenueBenjamins translation library · 2009
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAfrican history and culture analysis
Canadian institutionsConcordia University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsScholarshipAncient egyptClassicsIdeologyLiteratureHistoryCivilizationArtPolitical scienceArchaeologyPoliticsLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This is a case study of how the knowledge and practice of translation can be put to the service of history. The study addresses in particular the efforts of a renowned African scholar, Cheikh Anta Diop, in tracing the African antecedents of the Ancient Egyptian civilization. The focus is on Cheikh Anta Diop’s mastery and translation (or deciphering) of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Meroitic script into a modern written language script. Diop’s ultimate goal was to establish a historical and cultural connection between ancient Egypt and Black Africa, through a systematic translation of certain keywords and a comparative linguistic study of Ancient Egyptian and African languages. Diop was also interested in refuting arguments or hypotheses regarding the untranslatability of cultures, particularly between so-called primitive languages and modern, highly scientific languages. Although the debate about the link between Black Africa and Ancient Egypt had lost steam by the end of the 20th century, Diop’s work still carries weight in some scholarly circles, especially given the contemporary ideological importance of issues related to ethnicity and “identities” in disciplines such as postcolonialism and cultural studies. Whatever position one chooses to take on the debate on the subject of a ‘Black Egypt’, one cannot deny the considerable impact of Diop’s scholarship and, from a translation studies perspective, his role as an agent of translation in the writing of history.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.912
Threshold uncertainty score0.993

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.048
GPT teacher head0.232
Teacher spread0.184 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations6
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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