Translation Today Editors Awadesh Kumar Mishra V. Saratchandran Nair Volume 9, Number 1, 2015 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 CF & FS, SLL & CS, JNU A.S. Dasan University of Mysore Ch.Yashawanta Singh Manipuri University Mazhar Asif Gauhati University K.S. Rao Sahitya Akademi iii Translation Today Volume 9 No.1, 2015 Editors: Awadesh Kumar Mishra V. Saratchandran Nair © Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, 2015. 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 -2345006 (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 Marking Words with Part-of-Speech (POS) Tags within Text Boundary of a Corpus: the Problems, the Process and the Outcomes 5 Niladri Sekhar Dash What Unites India?: On the Role of Translation and Culture in Producing the Nation 25 Sushumna Kannan Inequality of Languages and the Question of Choice in Translation 56 Debarshi Nath Re-texting as Translation: A Study Based on Ramayana Translations in India 68 Sreedevi K. Nair Philosophical Affinity between Tagore and Sufi Poets of Iran 77 Niaz Ahmed Khan Reading the Eighth Schedule – As a Text on Multilingualism 93 Shakira Jabeen .B Issues of Reader in Translation Studies: A case of Dawn of Dreams 113 Md. Rizwan Khan An Introduction to the World of Monoranjan Byapari with a Translated Excerpt from Itibritte Chandal Jiban (Prathama Khanda) 132 Sayantan Mondal vi Filling in the Blank 148 Divya Pradhan Translating the Qur’ān: An Analysis of Discourse on Hijāb in Selected English Translations 157 Ubaid. VPC Between Being Readable and Being a “Translation”: A Study of Dawn of Dreams 178 M. Sridhar and Alladi Uma The Pre-Dawn Language of Dawn of Dreams 187 Sudhakar Marathé Translation in Odia: A Historical Survey 202 Aditya Kumar Panda NOTES The Tangled Mesh of Words and Worlds: The Inbetweenness of Language in the Literature Classroom 228 Ananya Dutta Gupta BOOK REVIEW A Book Review of NABAL JOMI, the Bengali Translation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Diasporic Novel THE LOWLAND : 240 Chandreyee Bhattacharjee CONTRIBUTORS 244 vii Editorial A year passed by after the resumption of the publication of Translation Today (TT), Vol.8.1 and 8.2 were published and released. It was very rewarding as far as TT was concerned as we were in a position to revamp and consolidate the journal. Reviving a journal in the field of Language and Linguistics is a hard task and in particular in the field of Translation and Translation studies. But we are deeply impressed that several scholars have given us immense support and they have come forward to chip in their best efforts and we humbly present before you to have a wonderful experience, while meandering through the articles. Please bear with us for any oddities. The views expressed in the articles are solely of the authors and the Editors or members of the Editorial Board are in no way responsible. We are also extremely thankful to the anonymous peer reviewers and all the supporting staff who helped us to get it printed. Dash’s paper on POS tags is the most illuminating for its readability and content. POS tagging is an important step in the process of Machine Translation, which Dash was able to demonstrate using empirical data from Bangla, the tag set prepared, though highly incomprehensible for human beings, it would be highly suitable linguistic information and data asked by a computer system. Sushumna in her paper on “On what unites India and the role of Translation”, brings up an alternative view of Indian writing in English Translation in addition to critically examining “Indian” in Indian literature and Indian writing in English. She discusses about the homogenising factors, the role of translation of Indian literature, issues of identity and India being a land of multiplicity of languages and cultures, how translation could forge and unite. Debarshi Nath accounts for the inequalities among the languages and more so among Indian languages that seldom well known writers in regional languages have been translated to English and other European languages and across Translation Today 1 Editorial Indian languages, particularly citing evidences from a language like Assamese. Further he raises certain pertinent questions of ideology, politics and power. Sreedevi Nair discusses on various aspects of re-texting. Primarily it is a case of transcreation, which involves a complex process of recreation of one or more original texts or selected parts of them to produce a target text, which has its own independent existence. At times certain recreated texts are far better than the original. Next is the article entitled “Philosophical affinity between Tagore and Sufi poets of Iran” by N.A. Khan, who has unravelled the intricate philosophical connection that existed between Tagore’s poems and that of the Persian poets such as Hafiz Shirazi and Jalaluddin Rumi. Though Tagore and Sufi poets lived in different times and in different geographical regions, they spoke the same language of love. Shakeera highlights the importance and the significance of languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution from the perspectives of multilingualism and translation. It also brings forth the mandate of the National Translation Mission and discusses about the relevance and implication of the policies at the higher education level as an outsider’s view. Rizwan Khan outlines the reader sensibilities of the translated text, citing a study on “Dawn of Dreams” from the original text in Urdu. He has conducted an empirical study (though the percentile is less) cutting across continents, which adds flavour to his research work, instead of simply theorising on the aspect of translation vis-à-vis readability, an aspect, which is significant to translation. He has also traced the theoretical developments on various aspects of translation. An introduction to the world of Manoranjan Byapari by itself is a world of its own, of the world of the underprivileged in the Indian Society that Sayantan Mondal narrates vividly and explicitly that one can only experience after reading it. Identity crisis is one of the serious issues faced by the Nepali community of the hill regions of Darjeeling and Divya Pradhan narrates through her article the vacuum created due to the identity crisis and how translation could be used as a tool to fill this blank. There have been several protests for preservation and protection of their identity. It also deals with the power relations within the socio- 2 Translation Today Editorial political-cultural-linguistic contexts in which these translations are created. Ubaid deals with another important aspect of translation of certain words such as “hijab”, “Zinat” etc., terms in Qura’an and the semantic interpretation of these terms. At times, it erupts as a serious topic of discussion and in this article, it is presumed that a proper interpretation is rendered. M. Sridhar and Alladi Uma analyse in their paper, how a reader, who does not know the original language evaluates the translated text “Dawn of Dreams” from Urdu. The questions, does the translation becomes the “original” when the readers do not know the original language and how do we look at the author of the English text, Mehr Afshan Farooqui. The pre-dawn language of Dawn of Dreams by Sudhakar Marathe is yet another discussion on the same translation as the previous one. He alludes to the fact that as a translation of the original novel in Urdu, it is a failure. Aditya Panda illustrates the historical development of the tradition of translation in Odia language, which has been taken up as one of the projects by National Translation Mission. 30th June, 2015 Prof. Awadesh Kumar Mishra Prof. V. Saratchandran Nair Translation Today 3 Marking Words with Part-of-Speech (POS) Tags within Text Boundary of a Corpus: the Problems, the Process and the Outcomes Niladri Sekhar Dash Abstract A natural language text stored in a corpus database in electronic version can be tagged at the part-of-speech (POS) level manually or automatically. In both cases, it has to be done carefully starting with the lowest level of hierarchy of tagset meticulously devised for a language or a language group. Once the lower level tag is selected and assigned to words, the higher level tags will be automatically identified and assigned. Although tagging of words may be done with a focus on the part-of-speech of words used in a piece of text, the long term goals should also be envisaged for developing a generic scheme that may be useful for incorporating various kinds of linguistic information easily at the later stages of text annotation. This paper argues for taking a judicious decision for tagging words with different types of information within a text following the universally accepted principles, maxims and rules adopted for part-of-speech tagging.