Translation into other languages distorted Bantu philosophical terms.

Evidence

Since the Bantu belong to the sub-Saharan Africans along the equator, and they include various clans and tribes having a common tradition, Tempels may not have been able to successfully generalise his vision for extending the Bantu philosophy to African Philosophy tout court. First of all, the work, which first appeared in Dutch, was translated into French with the title of La Philosophie Bantoue and published by A. Robbens in Congo in 1945. At this early stage the problem of language already occurs, and philosophical Bantu terms may not have transmitted the same content or meaning when expressed in other languages. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 210

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: which specific Bantu terms lost meaning across Dutch, French, English translation?
• SEED: Article angle: how translation corrupts indigenous philosophy — the La Philosophie Bantoue case as a lens.
• XREF: connects to: Translators deformed the same text for opposite ideological purposes; Translation choices can erase a religion’s core self-definition; Classical translations routinely distort meaning through culturally specific terms — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1600