Translation Today Editors Awadesh Kumar Mishra V. Saratchandran Nair Volume 8, Number 2, 2014 Editors Awadesh Kumar Mishra V. Saratchandran Nair Assistant Editors Geethakumary V. Abdul Halim Editorial Board Avadhesh Kumar Singh School of Translation Studies, IGNOU K.C. Baral EFLU, Shilong Campus Giridhar Rathi New Delhi Subodh Kumar Jha Magadh University Sushant Kumar Mishra School of Languages, IGNOU A.S. Dasan University of Mysore Ch.Yashawanta Singh Manipuri University Mazhar Asif Gauhati University K.S. Rao Sahitya Akademi iii Translation Today Volume 8 No.2, 2014 Editors: Awadesh Kumar Mishra V. Saratchandran Nair © Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, 2014. This material may not be reproduced or transmitted, either in part or in full, in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from : Prof. Awadesh Kumar Mishra Director Central Institute of Indian Languages, Manasagangotri, Hunsur Road, Mysore – 570 006, INDIA Phone: 0091/ 0821 -2515820 (Director) Pabx: 0091/ 0821 -2345052 Grams: BHARATI Fax: 0091/ 0821 -2345218 E-mail: [email protected] Website: http://www.ciil.org (Director) www.ntm.org.in To contact Head, Publications ISSN-0972-8740 Single Issue: INR 200; US $ 6: EURO 5; POUND 4 including postage (air-mail) Published by Prof. Awadesh Kumar Mishra, Director Designed By : Nandakumar L, NTM, CIIL, Mysore Printed by M.N. Chandrashekar CIIL Printing Press, Manasagangotri, Hunsur Road Mysore – 570 006, India iv In This Issue EDITORIAL 1 ARTICLES Translation Theories and Translating Assamese Texts 5 Manjeet Baruah Translation: An Inter-Cultural Textual Transference 31 Shamala Ratnakar Role of Translation in Comparative Literature 40 Surjeet Singh Warwal The Ghost of the Author and the Afterlife of Translation 61 Farheena Danta and Bijay K Danta Translation as Handloom: Acknowledging Family as (Re-) Source 76 Akshaya Kumar Discerning the Intimacies of Intertextuality: A. K. Ramanujan’s Hyphenated Cosmopolitan Approach to Translation Theory and Practice 90 A. S. Dasan Tread gingerly! Translation as a cultural act 105 Ravichandra P. Chittampalli Indenting the Proverbs: Some Notes on Translation 117 Vijay Sheshadri Issues in Translation: Translating from English to Maithili 132 P.K. Choudhary vi Integration of Technology & Translation for Measuring Meaning Interpretation 147 C.M. Vinaya Kumar et.al NOTES Translating a Classic The Experience of Translating Kanyasulkam 162 T Vijay Kumar & C Vijayasree Indian English Drama: Badal Sircar in Translation 169 Dhanya Johnson TRANSLATIONS Load 176 Tutun Mukherjee CONTRIBUTORS 186 vii Editorial We are extremely gratified to bring out the second issue of Vol.8 of Translation Today and thankful to the contributors who have extended support for their scholarly papers. We also express our immense thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers who have kept their deadlines. The paper by Manjeet Baruah draws our attention to the theoretical constructs of translation vis-à-vis with an analytical account of certain literary works in Assamese language. It also draws to our attention the overpowering cultural elements in Indian languages and the need for accounting it. For better elucidation he brings in Nida’s dynamic equivalence theory and Chomsky’s deep structure/surface structure theory. In fact, Chomsky cautioned against its appropriation in such a fashion (see Gentzler : 46). Shamala Ratnakar delves into the realms of culture and its intricacies when one transfers from source text to target text. She explains in detail the complexities involved.The paper by Surjeet Singh Warawal highlights the importance of translation in comparative literature without which one cannot study the intricacies of comparative literature. Great literatures in different languages have been shared by the humanity through translation. Copiously quoting several instances, he tries to establish his point of view. In the new criticism the dearth of the culture is appreciated and liberated from the text, whereas in middle ages, the name of the author was pertinent and critical. Then one can think of the translator. In fact the author relives better when his work is translated and becomes more visible. These are issues discussed by Farheena Danta and Bijay K Danta in their paper “The ghost of the author and the afterlife of Translator”. Quoting several works, Akshay Kumar considers translation as a family enterprise or as a handloom industry wherein involvement of family members or colleagues and friends have a great role to play, particularly he studies acknowledgements quoted by the translators. A.S. Translation Today 1 Editorial Dasan narrates lucidly and vividly A.K. Ramanujan’s translations in the paper, “Discerning the Intimacies of Intertextuality: A.K. Ramanujan’s Hyphenated Cosmopolitan Approach to Translation Theory and Practice”. He analyses the proper understanding of AKR’s work, the dichotomies it presents, the outer and inner poetic forms from two different sources, his multilingual and pluricultural background, his translations being wrongly interpreted by Tejaswini Niranjana with post-colonial theoretical underpinning and Vinay Dharwadker criticism of Niranjana are worth reading. Ravichandra C.P’s paper, “Tread gingerly! Translation as a cultural Act”, discusses about the politics of translation. He wades through various aspects of translation theory, market interventions, postcolonial, postmodern, deconstruction etc. quite often quoting translations from Kannada. The next paper is an interesting and original one on translation of proverbs used by Myasabedas, a tribal community of Chitradurga, Karnataka. Translation of such proverbs takes us to the anthropocentric nature of the usages. The paper by Vinay Kumar et.al is an empirical study of the meaning interpretation, when one is translating through “google translate, a computer assisted translation. The result/interpretation of which can gauged based on the presentation. Pawan Kumar Choudhary’s paper entitled “Issues in Translation: translating from English to Maithili” deals with various linguistics issues while translating from English to Maithili. The views expressed in this journal are of the authors and the editors or the editorial board would not be responsible in any manner. 30th December, 2014 Prof. Awadesh kumar Mishra Prof.V. Saratchandran Nair 2 Translation Today Translation Theories and Translating Assamese Texts Manjeet Baruah Abstract The paper is divided into two broad sections. The first section examines the changing focus of translation theories worldwide, especially in the last three decades, and the facility that the newer developments in translation theories have provided in translating texts in multi-lingual societies. It will be shown that vis-à-vis the old school of linguistic equivalence, the shifts into the fields of power discourse (i.e. politics of translation) and translation have provided the framework for approaching the praxis of translation in multilingual societies more fruitfully. The second section of the paper comprises two case studies of specific forms of writing in the Assamese language, viz. (a) Bezbarua and colloquial aesthetics, and (b) Indira (Mamoni Raisom) Goswami and multiple language variant textual structure. The two textual methods will be discussed vis-à-vis the problematic of their respective translations and in the context of the theoretical outline drawn in the first section. The objective of the exercise is twofold, viz. (a) to highlight and explore the potentials in applied translation vis-à-vis languages of North East India and (b) to emphasize the peculiarities in translating texts from or into languages and cultures of North East India. Keywords: translation theory, South Asia, North East India, Laksminath Bezbarua, Indira (Mamoni) Raisom Goswami, Assamese literature, modern Indian language, ideology, textual structure. Section I In this section, the attempt is to draw a broad outline of the debates in translation theories, especially in the 20th century, Translation Today 5 Translation Theories and Translating Assamese Texts and create the platform for the discussion on translation vis- à-vis languages of north east India (with Assamese texts as the illustration) in the subsequent section. Between the 1950s/60s and 1980s/90s, translation theories have undergone paradigm shift. The fundamental component of the shift has been the transition from models of praxis to models of analysis. For example, one of the most distinct features of translation debates in the 1950s/60s was the question of linguistic equivalence, i.e. how to arrive at linguistic equivalence between the source language (SL) and target language (TL). One of the underlying factors of the debate was the assumption of universal language. It was precisely because of the assumption of universal language that, irrespective of the positions that theorists held, that linguistic equivalence between the SL and TL was possible was never questioned. On the issue of linguistic equivalence and how to arrive at it between the SL and TL, one of the most comprehensive frameworks was perhaps offered by Nida (Nida, 1964). Nida not only focused on the possibility of equivalence, but also developed a model based on Chomsky’s system of deep structure-surface structure of language vis-à-vis SL-TL relation. The fundamental argument of Nida was that from the surface structure of the SL, the translator has to move