Volume 10, Issue 2, 2016

With the establishment of Translation Studies as a discipline, translation is being critiqued and celebrated in different ways. The celebration of the Translation Day demands its study from the perspective of multiple translation traditions in various civilizations. While the paper sees the Translation Day as a trope for celebration of translational endeavours all over the world, it proposes consideration of the translation as a bridge between knowledge and cultures from non-Eurocentric perspectives.
Keywords: Translation Day, St. Jerome, Narada, Hermes, Kumarajiva, Dara Shukoh

The concept of ‘norms’ was introduced into Translation Studies by Gideon Toury, the pioneer of Descriptive Translation Studies, in 1978, to refer to general values or ideas shared by a community. It is the norms that inform the decision making process of the translation as they function as the socio-cultural constraints specific to a culture, society and time and become prescriptive in nature. The translators as members of a given socio cultural, historical and temporal context would know the norms of translation behaviour that are in operation in their contexts and try to observe them in their translation. The present paper makes an attempt to examine and analyse some paratexts that accompanied translated texts in Telugu to understand the norms of translation behaviour that are in vogue in Telugu and to know the predominant trends in translation that play a role in determining what a good translation is or should be. This study also brings to light to some extent translation discourse in Telugu.
Keywords: Norms, Telugu, translation

This paper attempts to establish a feature-based approach to translate words related to the semantic domain of ‘cuisine’ with particular emphasis on verbs. Identification and listing of features belonging to a particular semantic domain is a challenging task as both deterministic and delimiting criteria need to be developed. Feature matrices thus developed are of immense help in tasks like translation, where cross-linguistic mapping of the maximum number of features will assist in selecting an appropriate equivalent. The main objective of the paper is to unify the established semantic theories like componential analysis, semantic domains and the implementation of the Lambda Calculus.
Keywords: Feature based approach, semantic domains, cuisine, translation, componential analysis, Lambda Calculus.

The political context, during the first half of the 20th century, in India, prompted many Indian writers to pen against the colonial power. The aim of their literary productions was to exercise a twofold influence over the readers: heightening their awareness about freedom and also about the need for a major social reform that will serve as a foundation for the development of post-independent India. By doing so, some of the writers wrote their individual ideas while others sought to introduce, through their writings, thoughts they borrowed from their European counterparts. They translated, adapted or even appropriated these thoughts as per the requirement of the socio-political framework in which the writing and the reading took place. Subramanya Bharathi, a national poet of India, was highly influenced by French literary works during his stay in Pondicherry in 1920s. In many of his essays, he expressed the thoughts of a few French authors, not merely because he personally valued them but the need of these thoughts to intensify the freedom movement in India. This article attempts to draw attention to the relation that Subramanya Bharathi had with the French literary world.
Keywords: Subramania Bharathi, French thoughts, Indian literature, Colonial context.

This paper aims at reading the folk rituals concerning rain and river among the Rajbanshi community of North Bengal. The different meanings associated with the ingredients of the rituals and the ritual symbols changed with the passage of time and space structure. However, case studies show that man-nature and super-nature are closely connected and this connection can be observed by reading and interpreting the ritual symbols. The extinction and presence of rituals also hint at how the people practicing them have changed according to their demands and necessities.
Keywords: Hudum Deo, Mecheni Khela, Rajbanshi

Besides the transformation brought to the Naga Hills by colonization and American missionaries, the subsequent colonial documentation/representation of the community has been of academic and scholarly interest in the recent years. Naga Hills were turned into a field of study. The literatures of the colonizing cultures distorted the experience and realities of the Nagas and portrayed them as inferior. The literatures framed the mindset of the readers to see the Nagas as chaotic, irrational and primitive, savage and effeminate people while the colonizers as ordered, rational and masculine. This article aims to focus on the Naga custom of taking heads that served as the important foundation of the ancient Naga society. The Nagas in the colonial literatures by and large are famously known for their “headhunting” tradition. This custom has given them a widespread notoriety in the colonial documentary records and in the neighbouring valleys. In fact, no tribe has a more established reputation for “headhunting” than the Nagas and even today Nagas are strongly associated with the term “head-hunters” by other ethnic groups. At present,, this practice may sound “barbaric” and “savage” but this game of glory was a part and parcel of every Naga village and was a serious business where the social, economic, political and other significant aspects of the lives of Nagas were tightly interwoven to this custom. However, the invading, “cultured” colonial Euro-Americans promoted the image of “headhunting” as a cruel and barbarous practice. The standards of “evaluation” deployed by the ethnographers which was not really an anthropologist’s array was not just. The ancient Nagas practised decapitation to serve a different purpose.Here,theintention is not to defend head- hunting” as a practice, but to provide a socio-historical perspective of it from within, from the perspective of the Nagas.
Keywords: Nagas, Head-hunting,Nokinketer,Ao-Naga Folksongs, Rewriting