Annotated translation of the song “Zumbi”, by Jorge Ben Jor, into Libras: an affective-translational manifest for the Black Awareness Day

Abstract

In this article, I describe the translation process from Portuguese into Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) of the song Zumbi, composed and recorded by Jorge Ben Jor in 1974 and re-recorded by Ellen Oléria in 2013. The social and intersubjective backdrop for this translation is my relationship, as an Afro-indigenous man, with my own ancestry and, as a sign language translator and interpreter, with the lack of access by the deaf community, for educational and linguistic reasons, to Afro-Brazilian culture and, for sensory and cultural aspects, to massive Brazilian popular music. This double identity dimension is intertwined with the possibility of publicizing anti-racist demonstrations and the defense of ethnic-racial guidelines on Black Awareness Day on widely accessible platforms such as social networks. The annotated translation presented here is theoretically based on the Bakhtinian conception of language, which understands that any semiosis is crossed and constituted by the social, historical, ideological, and alteritarian dimension; the Camposian concept of transcreation, which assumes that the complexity of a text expands the translator's transcreative possibilities; and the concept of intermodality present in Sign Language Translation and Interpretation Studies (ETILS), which observes the impossibility of splitting text and body in gesture-visual languages. I describe the translation process of the song pointing out the linguistic and narrative elements of the song and the Libras version, and highlighting the visual references that supported the linguistic-discursive choices in the target text.