Translation of Rita Chowdhury's Makam
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Insight: An International Journal for Arts and Humanities Peer Reviewed and Refereed Vol: 1; Issue: 3 ISSN: 2582-8002 The Concerns and Politics of Translation : Translation of Rita Chowdhury’s Makam Orisha Gogoi PG Student Department of English Tezpur University Abstract: Makam, published in 2010 has been a monumental piece in Rita Chowdhury’s literary career. Eight years following the publication of the text , Chowdhury published an English version of the same Chinatown Days on 11 January , 2018. Like the source text, the target text also received a good amount of critical acclamation. Renowned writers like Amitav Ghosh, Anjum Hasan waxed lyrical about the great work involving the plightful chronicles of the innocent Indo- Chinese people. Yet, like any other translated text, the target text has many intentional as well as unintentional omissions( errors)which we shall bring in light by laying much emphasis on factors like the structure, cultural references, names of characters, proverbs and idioms and the like. In this paper, we shall address the subtle politics involved in translation, along with the concerns prevalent in the same. Chowdhury’s Makam has been chosen as the source text of the present analysis and it’s translation Chinatown Days as the target text. The politics and problems of translation , the strategies adopted by the translator along with the changes the source materials undergo have been analyzed. In doing the same, both the source text and the target text have been read in parallel. Keywords: Translation ,translator, transfer, source text , target text Page | 50 Insight: An International Journal for Arts and Humanities Peer Reviewed and Refereed Vol: 1; Issue: 3 ISSN: 2582-8002 Translation is communication, a bridge through which people of different communities, having hold over different languages and having different cultures know about new cultures by reading texts from across the globe. The act of translating requires a huge amount of perseverance and dedication to convey the exact sense that the core text presents. This often makes the job of translation a ponderous task. In addition to the heavy load, the work of translation is also fraught with many other intricacies. It is common that while moving the content and the ideas from the source text to the target text, a substantial amount of changes take place. These changes also have a sense of loss in it. Often we see that the authentic sense of the source text goes missing in the target text. Reading the translated text i.e the target text does not give us the same amount of pleasure that we derived from reading the source text. There is a loss of authenticity backed by the loss of culture which again may include religious beliefs, social customs, proverbial wisdom which have been prevalent in the source culture since ages. Here the paper is going to discuss some key concerns found during the reading of the source text and the target text have been discussed along with examples from both the texts. Structure of the text While translating a text, change in the structure of the text is inevitable. It is not possible to maintain the structure of the source text without any alterations. There are a number of factors that contribute to this change, some of the primary ones are- omissions, additions, sentence splitting, sentence joining and the like. The very first chapter of source text Makam is a long one stretching over 22 pages. It is the very onset of the entire plot that introduces some characters who act as the foundation on which the entire plot is set. The character Arunav Bora through whose text Chowdhury voices the entire tale of betrayal of the Chinese origin Indians is introduced. Bora introduces himself and with this introduction starts the complexities of translation. Before disclosing his identity, he says:“Nirupai hezar manuhor bukuwe bukuwe lukai thoka ek bixador mohakabyor moi ejon okhyom rupkar matro” ( Chowdhury,11). Page | 51 Insight: An International Journal for Arts and Humanities Peer Reviewed and Refereed Vol: 1; Issue: 3 ISSN: 2582-8002 This when translated word for word in English is “ I am only an inept artist of the epic of the plight that has been hidden in the hearts of thousands of helpless people”. He then introduces Lailin Tham, a well known Chinese writer and narrates how she enlightened him with the facts of the Indo-China war and how those facts inspired him to pen the plightful saga of the Chinese people once residing in India. In Chinatown Days, our target text,the entire introduction is extracted from the first chapter and a fresh prologue is constructed . There in the prologue, the translator through the narrative voice of Bora, briefly narrates about a heated conversation taking place between him and Lailin Tham that led to Bora writing the rest of the novel. Adding a prologue before diving in the core plot might be a technique to give a clarity on the otherwise complexly woven narrative structure of the text to its target readers. The very first line “Nirupai….matro” though has been translated quite diligently, the original essence is somewhat lost in it.:“I am but an inept artist , the narrator of this epic saga of a people caught in the maelstrom of history”(Chowdhury,1). If we read the source line, we do not get any words that are equivalent to the words - ‘history’ and ‘maelstrom’. Yet the translator happened to install such words in the translation. Due to the installation of the prologue in the target text we find that the 1st chapter of the same is short in comparison to the source text stretching only over 7 pages. This is not the only instance where the structure has been meddled with .The entire fourth chapter of the 2nd part of the Assamese text has been cut short and merged with the 3rd chapter itself. Factors similar to this contributed to the structural transition of the target text. Translators while transferring the ideas from the core text to the target text, skip some part of the text. This omission is sometimes very violent to endure. Such omissions can at times be unintentional and at times, intentional. There are many such instances in the target text, where one can see such omissions. Title of the text Besides the aforementioned concern involved, we see a character in the source text saying “ Moi makam jabo”(Chowdhury,137) when the same is conveyed in English he says “I am going to Makum”. In this light, the question that becomes apparent is - If ‘Makam’ is conveyed as Page | 52 Insight: An International Journal for Arts and Humanities Peer Reviewed and Refereed Vol: 1; Issue: 3 ISSN: 2582-8002 ‘Makum’ in the target text, why is the title of the translated text ‘Chinatown days’ and not ‘Makum’? After all, the title of the source text is based on the town in Upper Assam where almost 50% of the plot has been set. Chinatown could refer to any place in India where Chinese people resided. If viewed in this light, we can find a Chinatown in Kolkata and in other parts of India as well. ‘Chinatown’when translated in native language is ‘Cheenapatti’. Whereas , ‘Makam’ is the Cantonese word for the English term ‘Golden Horse’. Changing the title of the source text while translating it is akin to not being faithful to the very spirit of the text. “Makam” has a cultural connotation attached to it. It easily binds the heart of the reader to the spirit of the text with an emotional chord. Any reader will be able to connect to it without much effort. But “Chinatown Days” doesn’t have any such connotation. The translator while translating the text stripped it off its cultural essence and value. And the very title of the text is it’s onset. Code Switching A well known fact it is, that language and culture go hand in hand. Various cultures create various languages. A language of a place is not independent of its culture. A text in any language is written in conformity with the culture and the social conduct of the people residing in that place. In such a case when a text, full of cultural connotation is translated to another language which is alien to such cultures and social conduct, the source text loses it’s label. Since language is embedded with culture, a certain amount of the language used clearly reflects the culture that envelops it. Sometimes, while translating a text, translators often meddle with the materials to meet the needs of the target readers. They do the same by minimizing the alienness of the source text .There’s a similar instance of the same with our concerned texts. In chapter 5 of the third part of the text,we read about the soldiers raising slogans in their own languages: “Kalika mata ki jai Jo bole so nihaal, …. Jwala maata ki jai Aayo gurkhali”( Chowdhury, 314) Page | 53 Insight: An International Journal for Arts and Humanities Peer Reviewed and Refereed Vol: 1; Issue: 3 ISSN: 2582-8002 The lines above in the source text carry a considerable amount of significance in it for it shows the secularism and the integrity of Indian Army. It reflects the diversity of India as a nation . In the target text, these war cries in the respective mother tongues of the soldiers of different regiments is omitted and the entire scenario is described as: “The battlefield was deafening, filled with the agonizing howls and the battle cries of the warring soldiers of different regiments”( Chowdhury,213). Perhaps such a transition must have taken place in order to familiarize the content of the text to the receiving culture.