Indian Translation Traditions: Perspectives from Sujit Mukherjee

This paperrevisits Sujit Mukherjee’s seminal work Translation as Discovery and Other Essays on Indian Literature in English Translation (1981) to analyze his contribution in foregrounding the translation traditions of India. In the book, he uses the term ‘transcreation’ to refer to translation as a practice in the Indian literary scenario and cites examples from the ancient to modern times, to show how we have perceived and practiced translation. He centers this process in contrast to the western practice of the same, which makes translation a postcolonial exercise. He emphasizes the need to focus on the pragmatic analysis of the process of translation and looking at the ‘Indo-English literature’, as ‘a limb of the body, the purusha, that is Indian literature’ which would help in decolonizing literary studies.

Howard Goldblatt’s Translations of Mo Yan’s Works into English: Reader Oriented Approach

This article examines the strategies followed by Howard Goldblatt, the official translator of Mo Yan while translating his works from Chinese into English. Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012 and critics argued that it was Goldblatt’s translation that was mainly responsible for Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Though Mo Yan’s works in translation are available in various languages, it is Goldblatt’s version that has become most popular. Therefore, from the perspective of Translation Studies, it would be interesting to identify the techniques used by Goldblatt that make his translations so special. The present paper compares titles, structure, and culture-specific expressions in the original and its English translation to identify the strategies followed by Howard Goldblatt in translating Chinese literary texts.

The Ecology of Translation: A Case Study of Two Different Translations of Kanyasulkam in English

The interface between the translators and their ecological environment becomes vital in understanding the nature of the translation carried outand the final shape the target texts take. The translators’ subjectivity can only be understood in relation to their context of production, circulation,and reception. It is therefore important in any product-oriented research to study the ecological environment of the translators and its influence on their decision-making process and the translation strategy that they adopt. The present paper is an attempt in that direction. It presents a case study of two different translations of a Telugu classical text, Kanyasulkam, in English. The study reveals how the overall context of translation becomes a major agency in conditioning the work of the translators and how it accounts for the divergence between the two translations of the text selected. It also brings to the fore a very interesting technique of translating a classical text from India by a transnational translatorin an alien environment for the consumption of the distant other.

On Nepali Translation of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea: The Analysis of Translation Strategies

The present paper is an attempt to explore the translation of The Old Man and the Sea, by Khagendra Mani Pradhan in 2010 and, by Sanjiv Upadhay in the same year, 2010. The paper discusses the two translation strategies and methodologies adopted by both translators in a similar socio-cultural, political, and historical context, and how both the translations present The Old Man and the Sea uniquely within Nepali Polysystem. Hence, it emphasizes the function and role of translation in a Polysystem, that is relatively new and trying to incorporate or express the contemporary socio-political context through the medium of literature.

A Rule-based Dependency Parser for Telugu: An Experiment with Simple Sentences

This paper is an attempt in building a rule-based dependency parser for Telugu which can parse simple sentences. This study adopts Pāṇini’s Grammatical (PG) tradition i.e., the dependency model to parse sentences. A detailed description of mapping semantic relations to vibhaktis (case suffixes and postpositions) in Telugu using PG is presented. The paper describes the algorithm and the linguistic knowledge employed while developing the parser. The research further provides results, which suggest that enriching the current parser with linguistic inputs can increase the accuracy and tackle ambiguity better than existing data-driven methods.