SEMANTIC NEGOTIATION AND RELIGIOUS TRANSLATION

The translation of religious texts has always been a perilous undertaking, especially when it concerns a sacred text. Indeed, seeing translation as an act of communication requires a knowledge of the communicative parameters that constitute it. The translator-speaker, who plays the role of intermediary, must create an interaction at the level of meaning and its semantic components. From this emerges the role of the addressee as the main protagonist and the only interpretative force of the message. Thus, the process of negotiation manages the translating activity, since the transfer of a message is not only reduced to a process of reformulation of the source text in another language, but, largely exceeds this compartmentalization. We will first discuss the challenges and stakes of the translation of religious texts, which we have chosen to illustrate with examples that make this aspect clear. Then, we will insist on the question of the translation as a semantic negotiation, considering that there is a confrontation between transmitter and receiver from the point of view of knowledge, historical and linguistic references. Indeed, this facet of the pyramid where the cultural dimension of translation and interpretation is played out remains unknown and implicit. It is quite easy to reveal what is related to the cultural, social and historical reality of a particular receiver. But that is not enough to communicate, it is also necessary to question the cultural references of this one, the representations conveyed by the language. Indeed, we have chosen to present examples of the Holy Qur'an translated by translators of different religions, and given that some translations have deviated from the noble mission of translation, in this case, the faithful transmission of the meaning, without any objectivity whatsoever, especially when it is a sacred text whose inimitability is not to be proven or tested. Thus, the difficulty in our choice stems, on the one hand, from the sacred character of the chosen writing, and on the other hand, from the nature of research in this field which is condemned to remain always relative. Since several elements control the translation of the sacred text, namely, the language, the tradition and the personal factors of the translator. Finally, the field of religious translation requires a great deal of precision and neutrality, and a constant rethinking of the fact that the slightest subjective or cultural interpretation could call into question our research work. Thus, when it comes to cultural transfer, the translator's task is to take into consideration the knowledge that already exists in the target culture about the source culture. Indeed, it is necessary to know how to relate the knowledge concerning the target culture to the knowledge via the source culture. The translator is the first receiver who receives and interprets the message; he will therefore try to understand the source culture with his own knowledge and value judgments. The translator is indeed a mediator because he assumes two roles, that of receiver and reader of the source message, however, the translator having a task of reader which must be different from that of the normal reader, since he must undoubtedly appropriate the competence of mediator in communication which crosses with the function of transmitter of the translated message. Moreover, this same message undergoes a second transfer; the target reader receives it and interprets it in turn according to his own ideological and cultural schemes. Thus, the process of the translated text is not limited to a single phase, but, it enchains back and forth during which the text acquires the imprint of the translator who makes the transfer. Without forgetting to negotiate the meaning by respecting all the circumstances of the original text. So, to what extent can this semantic negotiation communicate the said and the unsaid of the text? .

Introduction

The first two, very short sections introduce the questions this book aims to answer and outlines how the answers are distributed over the chapters. The next section is for those unfamiliar with Suhrawardī and the world of image, giving a primer on what scholars have been able to figure out so far. The latter half of the chapter explains the methodology. Next to conventional close reading, this book also utilizes a form of ‘distant reading’. In general, this approach uses automated searches through a large corpus of texts to detect patterns that would go unnoticed for a normal reader. For this book, it means that especial attention is paid to the intertextuality of all texts within a commentary tradition. By tracing the very same sentence in dozens of texts and mapping their mutations, a genealogy can be established which is a proxy for the trajectory through history of an idea.

Trials and Tribulations of Immigrants in Bharathi Mukherjee’s Wife

Bharati Mukherjee is one of the most well known immigrant writers of America. Immigration is an amalgamated journey experience of oneself to another country. Migration separates one from their mother land towards an alien land, where it is marked by new culture and new adjustments. Bharathi Mukherjee’s novel wife portrays an immigrant looking back to her mother country with pain and nostalgia. Bharathi Mukherjee had beautifully carved the shapes of the characters that even a normal reader feels the presence of their tribulations as the personal grievances. The present article focuses on the trials and tribulations experienced by the Indian woman migrating to alien lands after her marriage. Dimple, the female protagonist of Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife, faces the problem of loss of culture and the quest for a new identity in the US.

Modality of Stimulus Presentation in Serial Learning for Retarded and Normal Readers

The present study investigated the relationship between modality functioning and reading achievement. Auditory, visual and combined auditory-visual serial learning tasks were administered to normal and retarded readers at three grade levels ( N = 48). The data indicated that retarded readers exhibited a markedly uneven pattern of learning efficiency. Their performance was especially poor with regard to auditory tasks, whereas their visual learning skills were almost equivalent to those of the normal reader group.