Mother-tongue is a construct of translational consciousness that is mediated through colonial culture. It is commodified as a cultural and symbolic capital on which literacy and literariness are predicated, and these constitute cultural nationalism. All this is illustrated in the case of the Odia language as explored by this paper. The paper also discusses the cultural process of the emergence of Odia mother tongue, focusing on the shift from desaja and tadbhava register to Sanskritic tatsama register with regard to the word ‘kokila’ that eventually replaced ‘koili’ in a changing poetic context.
Keywords: Translation, literacy, orality, vernacular, mother tongue, literacy.

This paper seeks to uncover the politics surrounding the selection and elimination in the process of translation by presenting instances of the translation of classical masterpieces supported by contemporary postulations. Translation is not a mechanical transposition of words across languages but a cognitive activity that demands active participation of the translator as the individual identity of the translator is not isolated from the process. Most of our acquaintance with the Western and Greek epics has been through English translations and it will not be naive to say that many of these translations have themselves become classics by virtue of various translation strategies. There are multiple manners in which a translation can be approached but none provide a universal model or blueprint for translation as it is not free from the translator’s ideology and intervention. Besides cultural appropriation and maintaining equivalences (grammar, style, vocabulary), untranslatability is one of the major challenges for the translators of ancient epic romances such as the Ramayana, the Iliad or the Dastan-e Amir Hamza. Heterogeneous factors compromise the translation of certain sections in classics (the obscene, erotic) that disturb the organicity of a work. Despite the sincere efforts of the translator, the politics of censorship, bowdlerization, publishers and power structures are major impediments of translations and discourses. Therefore, translation becomes an incomplete simulacrum of the original text. Ethically, poetic justice can only be achieved when a text is produced in unexpurgated form as in case of the translation of the Dastan-e Amir Hamza by Musharraf Ali Farooqi.
Keywords: Translation, classic, untranslatability, epic, dastan.

There has been an evident shift in the focus of English literature towards the new writings of the erstwhile colonized nations. The new writers wanted to posit their multifarious experiences that went beyond the boundaries of ethnicity and diaspora, to a level that claimed the recognition of main stream literature on the basis of the human experiences recorded in them. Thus, diasporic literature had the touch of writers who wanted to assert their national identity and also to express their point of view on the impact of colonization. The writings relocated, reconstituted, re-examined and re-established the contours of culture among others. The paper titled Translation of Diasporic Conflict as represented in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss takes a look at the current issues of globalization, multiculturalism, immigration, westernization, postcolonialism, terrorist violence, alienation and exile. Technological advancements have made the concept of space and time shorter and thus a new connotation can be given to the term diaspora. Thus, the paper finds out how diaspora works on two levels – life on two continents – the cultural encounter in the context of a globalised scenario. This new reading of diaspora is done in the context of the wide canvas of the 2006 Man Booker Prize winning novel The Inheritance of Loss by the renowned Indian born American author Kiran Desai.
Keywords: Diaspora, cultural conflict, ethnicity, westernization, globalised scenario.

This paper argues how the fairytales of colonial Bengal resist closure in absorbing the very silence of the gendered discourse of nationalism of which the genre is a product. The paper tries to address how the nineteenth century Bengali fairytales registered subversive moments in the process of the evolution of a new historical consciousness, one that both accepted and rejected the dominant categories of available gender identities. The paper broadly deals with issues of pregnancy and its representation in fairytales. It examines how particular socio-cultural meanings of pregnancy play a vital role in the understanding of our fairy stories. The working definition of fairytale provided by Vladimir Propp insists that the functional axis of fairytale proceeds from lack toward fulfillment. While poverty has been the traditional marker of this lack in fairy tales from distant parts of the world, nineteenth-century Bengali fairytales have defined this lack especially in terms of childlessness. This is something symptomatic of the contemporary discourses of gender roles. This paper analyzes stories from collections like Thakumar Jhuli and folktales of Bengal involving discourses of pregnancy and childbirth, motherhood and fatherhood in ways varied and critical, and exposes the very instability of the cultural meanings of these concepts.
Keywords: Fairytales, gender, pregnancy, labour room, male-impotency, breastfeeding, nationalism, colonial Bengal.

If translating prose is a challenging task, translating poetic text is a greater challenge and even considered impossible by many scholar-translators who made honest attempts to do the same. To render as equally as possible the form and the content of the original work into the target language remains the eternal concern of literary translators. Although it is desirable to keep both, the aesthetic value and the message intact in translation, most of the times, translators succeed in rendering one of them and scarify the other. Tirukkural, the monumental poetic work of Tamil literature, has been translated into numerous languages across the world including French. After the first translation into French in 1767, Kural has been translated several times again into the same language by several scholars. Among the available translations in French, the one done by Lamairesse in 1868 and another one done by Gnanou Diagou in 1942 are particularly remarkable as the former is a native French speaker and the latter is a Francophone of Tamil origin. This paper presents the differences and similarities between the two aforementioned translations and thereby attempts to investigate the possibility of translating the masterpiece of the philosopher Tiruvalluvar into a foreign language. Keywords: Translation, poetry, French, Tamil, Tirukkural.
Keywords: Translation, poetry, French, Tamil, Tirukkural.

This paper is a part of my ongoing PhD research. The work as a whole does focus on how the day-today lives and beliefs of the fisherfolk have become to what it is now, tracing back to the unwritten history they have been carrying along generations, through collective memories and icons based on their experiences, from a literary point of view. This paper, in particular, is based on the narratives of the fishing community from Alleppey, and Trivandrum, two major coastal districts of Kerala, a Southern State in India, and also compares their oral narratives and representations in other media. The research questions that led to this study have popped up while reading the famous Malayalam novel, Chemmeen by Thakazhi Shivasankara Pillai.
The paper is based on the query about the existence of certain myths, especially those concerning the chastity of women and the concept of purity, as highlighted and overtly emphasised in this particular novel and other similar narratives. How does their collective memory get translated into their day-today lives and rituals? This paper specifically looks into the layers of translation interconnecting the concepts of purity and woman's body based on conversations with the fisherfolk, and their representation or misrepresentation in other media.
Keywords: Memory, experience, translation, gender, fisherfolk narratives.

This article envisages proving the universality of the norm of rewriting in the genre of Children’s Literature and its translation. The article seeks to prove how re-writing is a phenomenon integral to the genre of children’s literature. The author then goes on to prove how this norm is at play in even cultures as distant as the Indian and the German. Finally, attempt is made to identify the reasons for this norm. While proving the prevalence of this norm in the children’s literature of the world, the article subtly reveals the power equations that are at play like societal structures, religious establishments and political forces (Itamar Even-Zohar). These, sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle forces, shed light on the scheming forces that shape the world of translation by playing a crucial role in deciding what gets translated, how it gets translated and why it gets translated when it does get translated. This paper envisages focusing on these forces of Translation with special reference to the translations of children’s literature in the world.
Keywords: Rewriting, children’s literature, Polysystem theory, politics of translation, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the Panchatantra.