I always hear the phrase “A ka ca Ala fɛ” (Lit. “It is abundant chez God…”) and I often interpret at meaning something like “More often than not” or “Most of the time” or "Normally, but I’m not 100% of the best rendering.
Does anyone have any insights?
I will follow up on this thread too if I dig into it and/or find some useful information!
Hi Coleman, I ask my friend and he Said
It’s, just if you want to say Godhas so much!
Hieß es it’s used if you Praise something Humanscan not Produce like Gold and the ground or Water Child is born. The Wonder of Life..
I ni ce, Kathrin! Thanks for asking.
I am aware of this literal meaning that is close to “God has so much” but in my experience, it’s also used in cases where the meaning is not so literal.
For instance, here’s a real-life spoken example that I have in a video (plus a potential translation):
Furu bɛ ten. Gɛlɛya caman b’à la, mais à ka ca Ala fɛ, à bɛ nɔgɔya.
“Marriage is thus. It has many difficulties, but by God’s grace, it gets easier”"
But I wonder if in the excerpt, it could also be reasonably translated as something like “most of the time” or “most likely”, etc.
Interesting discussion! Sounds like it is synonymous with “A ka ca a la.” This phrase occurs more than 100 times in the Bambara edition of Where There Is No Doctor, and seems to be translated from the French “généralement” or English “commonly” or “frequently.”
https://gafe.dokotoro.org/search?multi=True&lang=bam&key=%22a+ka+ca+a+la%22
I ni ce, @matiyu! Thanks for weighing in. Yeah, it does seem like it might be near synonymous with “A ka ca Ala fɛ”. Interestingly, “A ka ca Ala fɛ” doesn’t appear in Where There is No Doctor.
But it does appear 57 times in the Bambara Reference Corpus.
“A ka ca a la”, on the other hand, appears 1,250 times in the corpus.
In the end for the subtitles, I opted for “by God’s grace” to capture the religious connotation of the turn phrase (plus, I hope, the intended message), but originally, I had translated it as “most of the time”.