Lutz Marten is a linguist and scholar specialising in African languages, particularly the Bantu languages of Eastern and Southern Africa. He is Professor of General and African Linguistics at SOAS University of London, where his research examines language structure, variation and change, multilingualism, and the relationship between language, society, culture and identity. His work has focused especially on Swahili, Bemba and Herero, and includes major contributions to comparative Bantu linguistics, language contact and morphosyntactic variation.
Marten’s approach to translation extends beyond the movement of words from one language into another. In his work on “translating language”, he explores how language itself can be translated into visual, material and symbolic forms: scripts, flags, currency, monuments, architecture and art. Drawing on the idea of intersemiotic translation, he examines how something dynamic and intangible can be made physically present, and how those representations become expressions of national identity, cultural memory and political power.
Fasiri Fasara Fasaha 
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