Volume 11, Issue 1, 2017

This paper challenges the static notions of a ‘source text’, fixed and ‘bordered’ in language and time, and serving as the prototype for a translation that is always and inevitably seen to take place in a cultural ‘elsewhere’. It explores instead the source and the target not as binaries separated by cultural and linguistic borders, but as a spectrum, one conflating into the other. This model of thought is particularly helpful in the context of the Gujarati writer Jhaverchand Meghani (1897- 1947) who was a prolific writer, critic and journalist. This paper limits itself to the context of his pioneering work in Gujarati folk literature, especially a collection of lokavarta or folk stories about the Rajput life and valour in medieval Saurashtra called Saurashtrani Rashdhar. Meghani travelled far and wide in Saurashtra over a period of several years collecting and documenting repositories of oral culture through folk stories, songs, ballads and various other popular forms. His sources were people from various occupations, castes, gender and class. Sometimes there was more than one version of the same tale and sometimes the same story contained idioms of two languages of regions that were linguistically similar, like Kutch and Kathiawad. How does one think of borders and sources in these contexts? This paper looks at a number of such consequences in the context of Meghani’s folk stories and examines sites of translational borders and exchanges in order to propose a new way of thinking about sources and targets.
Keywords: Shape-shifting Sources, Illusory Targets, Meghani, Saurashtrani Rasdhar, Translation and Borders.

Translation is a methodological democratic tool. It not only uses the ‘original’ discourses as its means to create awareness for texts in various language forms; it can also be credited for recreating adaptations, interpretations, and retellings as a knowledge form. An entire semiotic body of work is exchanged into another expansive body consisting of different registers and temporalities, which furthermore interfaces with a new social, political and cultural context. The role of time as a chronological factor only is a fallacy, as it meanders through the translation process and marks its presence through the transcreation processes. The paper proposes to delve into the lives of the Buddhist nuns as described in the Therigatha, and highlight how the fluidity and inter-textual nuances of translation in English language influences the reception of the centuries old text. Reading for the purpose of understanding a text is not only individualistic, but is a social and political process which may sometimes colour the entire spectrum of receiving a discourse.
Keywords: Translation, Reception, Chronology, Culture Controlled Preferences, Transcreation.

In Translation Studies, what is the relation of one text with another? When we ‘synthesise’ a composite text, as translation or as recreation, out of several ‘variants’ or source language text, what is its status and use? When several types get mixed together to form new texts, it becomes the admixture random and promiscuous. Or does it add up to a functioning unity, serving an artistic, meaningful whole? These are questions which are related with and raised against translation. In my proposed paper I would like to attempt answers to the above questions – not only theoretically but also through the analysis of Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s Madhushala and its archetype, the ‘mixture of types, the ‘variants’ with Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Bachchan’s own translation of Fitzgerald’s Khayyam ki Madhushala and how do they mean what they actually mean. In the rest of the paper, I shall try to reconstruct and explain how translation can lead and help in the production of knowledge from some Indian Philosophical point(s) of view. For example, the cannibalistic theory of textual consumption has been reworked to offer an alternative perspective on the role of the translator, one in which the act of translation is seen in terms of physical metaphors that stress both the creativity and the independence of the translator. This same theory finds its parallel in our Indian Philosophy in case of knowledge production, where knowledge is produced and reproduced through the process of translation and results in a new creative work of the translator, having his/her independence over the target language text. Thus, through Bachchan’s Madhushala I would like to show one of the possible Indian views of translation as a process of knowledge production and the need for freedom of knowledge that is translation from barrier, which Lawrence Venuti calls “the scandal of translation”.
Keywords: Translation, Knowledge, Indian Philosophy, Madhushala, Scandal, Freedom

Lexical gaps pose an insurmountable problem before a translator who deals with two languages which are distanced by un-bridgeable cultural differences. The present paper focuses on how certain techniques can be applied to ameliorate the word level problems posed by the non-correspondence of words and meanings between English and Telugu while translating religious texts. This paper puts forth a set of parameters for overcoming such problems.
Keywords: The Holy Bible, Translation, God, Holy Spirit, Temple, Telugu Translators and Equivalence

This study problematizes the translating of the Bible into Malayalam by engaging in a comparative analysis of three Malayalam translations of select passages from the Gospel according to John. Surveying these texts from the subject position of woman and an informed reader, the study tries to understand the gender nuances embedded with translated texts. The attempt is to voice the silences within the texts by intervening the text using grammar, vocabulary and meaning as indicators of patriarchal traces and gender asymmetries.
Keywords: Translation, Translator, the Bible, Gender, Woman, Patriarchy, Lexicon