Capturing a digital history of local Hausa narratives in a cross-institutional, multilingual translation project across borders

In our session, we would like to give the benefit of our experience in putting together a cross-institutional, yet firmly local digital project in the form of an interactive website, a resource that also serves as a learning product. With our joint AMICAL Small Grant funded project “Capturing a digital history of local Hausa narratives in a cross-institutional, multilingual translation project across borders” being both locally sited and transnationally informed, and involving a colonial text about the region and local oral narratives moving into conversation in translation(s), it has required us and our students to get to grips with a variety of different operating levels and to develop and exercise a variety of different skills: practical, theoretical and most predominantly digital. In this, we have worked with both local and international partners, and are especially grateful to Laila Ahmed (AUN) for her exceptional assistance of students on all sides of the translation experience. Our aim is to take visitors through the stages of our journey on this project, from the practical aspects of text selection, interview set up, and student interaction in these areas to broader questions of translation challenges associated with these sensitive written and oral texts, and the ways our students and we ourselves have attempted to address these, and finally to the challenges and opportunities involved in creating an interactive, largely student-led, public-facing web space that both brings its visitors into contact with the texts themselves, and brings these texts into a productive conversation with each other.