Volume 5, Issue 1 & 2, 2008

Literary translation is not a scientific procedure but involves a personal initiative towards the mediation of languages and cultures. The translator’s task is to determine how to change one text into another while preserving the original text’s meaning. The act of negotiation between the source language text/culture and the target language text/culture requires a delicate balance, of engaging with exciting and provocative strategies of transference and language use at every turn. Having covered the whole gamut of perspectives — from the notions of ‘traduttore traditore’, ‘invisibility’ of the translator and ‘transparency’ of translation to the ‘beauty/fidelity’ and ‘imaginative interpretation’ debates — translation is poised at a self-conscious moment, calling attention to its ‘madness,’ the process of its coming into being. This paper will probe the way the new strategy of ‘bringing the reader/reviewer to the text’ further complicates the tension-filled relationship of SLT, TLT and the translator.
Key words: Translation, Translation Studies, Communication, Language, Metaphor, Translator

The translator’s invisibility is a spectre which still haunts the practice of translation in the West. Theoretical advances in Translation Studies in the last quarter of the twentieth Century have not succeeded in restoring to the translator the inalienable rights of the author. The adoption of the notion of translation as a form of rewriting and the rejection of the duality of ‘original-translation’ are small beginnings for bringing the translator back to visibility. Other issues like dismantling the copyright regime as applicable to translations have to follow.
Reviewers of translations who describe both the translation and the antecedent text have to reckon with the fact that their reviews may ultimately contribute only to translation theory. Such reviews normally interest only bilingual readers who would not need the translation in the first place. For the monolingual reader there is no way to verify the comparative analyses. The problem can perhaps be overcome by placing the review in a larger context of the interface of cultures or as a symptomatic instance of cultural dissemination/ appropriation/ domestication/foreignisation. Another way, of course, is to make the review eminently readable even for non-professional readers.
Key words: Translator, Rewritings, Globalization, Source language, Indian languages

There has been almost a total saturation in the field of Translation Studies in India during the past decade: everyone seems to be an expert on the very difficult matter of ‘Translation’ just because they happen to know two languages. It seems to me that there is a need to discriminate between translators who are engaged in the act of translation and scholars who analyse those texts in the larger socio-historical context. While it has been assumed in the Anglo-American world that the translation theorist needs to be a translator first, I think that in India this situation does not work. Here, there has to be a distinction between the two in a large majority of cases because most of these translators are not simply aware of the academic discipline of Comparative Literature which initiated the study of translation as a viable mode of analyzing inter-cultural transfers. This paper proposes to deal with the pathetic situation of Translation Studies in India in spite of the fact that a lot of good translations are being done here at this time. My personal experience of being a student of the discipline of Translation Studies would form the base of this paper.
Key words: Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, Original text, Translated text, Target language

Translations have greatly influenced, enriched and transformed Malayalam literature. Yet one is often baffled by the lack of adequate reviews and studies of these translations in Kerala where translation has occupied a key position in the literary polysystem. Even the reviews that do appear display a propensity to treat the translated texts not as translations but as works ‘natural’ to Malayalam, thus negating their foreignness and making them prey to too easy an appropriation into the oeuvre of Malayalam literature. Such reviews and readings in turn both promote and breed annexationist translations and also sanctify imitations, adaptations and rewritings often without due acknowledgements of the original. This paper argues that in a culture too ready to invest the foreign language text with domestic significance, the process of domesticating the text continues from the act of translation to that of reading and reviewing. This could be the reason why the reviews too are generally seen to be inscribed with domestic intelligibilities and ideologies, treating the translated work rather as a domestic inscription than as one bearing the function of inter-cultural communication.
Key words: Mother tongue, Malayalam literature, Translation, Domestication, Adaptation

This paper will look at some of the primary issues in reviewing translations — by whom, for whom, when, and how. Examples will be drawn from twelve reviews that appeared in the December 2006 issue of the journal ‘The Book Review’. All the questions to be discussed cannot be enumerated here, but here are a few: a. Who should be preferred as the reviewer of a translated text: one who knows the original language or one who does not (the intended reader)? b. Who should the reviewer be addressing? General reader? Those concerned with Translation Studies? Readers within the country? Readers anywhere who know the language of the translated text? c. How much emphasis should be given in the review to the year of original publication? How important is it for the reviewer to know if the text had been translated earlier? If it is an older text, is it necessary for the reviewer to foreground her awareness of the changes that happen over time— in language use, in social practice, in literary taste? d. What should be the priority for the reviewer: providing the context, analyzing the text, commenting on the act of translation?
Key words: Translation Studies, Reviewer, Original Language, Source Language, Critical reader

This paper shall attempt to capture a few moments in the history of the reception of ‘English Geetagalu’ by the Kannada reading public by way of reading some of the critical responses to it so as to sketch the ‘primary role’ it has supposedly played in fashioning modern Kannada literature. It argues that the text ‘English Geetagalu’ bears the marks of the discourse of colonial modernity that produced it as a canonical one. Also, in the context of ‘English Geetagalu’ it attempts to revisit the question of ‘invisibility’ or the ‘marginality’ of translators—a question that has been raised time and again in Translation Studies. It would argue along with Tejaswini Niranjana that the translator’s preoccupation with the method and eagerness to present the translated text as a unified and transparent whole results in the exclusion of the translator from the text to which the translator gives an after-life. Despite their exposure, training and explicit belief in the humanist tradition of the West, the early Kannada translators such as B.M. Srikantia (1884-1946) seem to overcome this predicament in their practice.
Keywords: Kannada literature, Translation, Literary Culture, Poetry, English

Most deliberations in the field of translation tend to regrettably leave out the crucial task of reviewing. In a multilingual country like ours, reviews of translation serve as the prism through which (literary) texts get disseminated across linguistic and cultural barriers. While translation enthusiasts give reviewing a mandatory nod, most critics seem to think that it is an institutional matter that involves the predilections of editors and so called reviewers, over which others have little or no control. Consequently, reviewing of translated texts gets done in a haphazard and shoddy manner. Usually, the stress is on the biography of the authors, his/her cultural context and milieu, and predictably, the gist of the text(s) translated. At the end, the reviewer may in passing throw in a paragraph or two about the -quality of translation without going into the specifics. This paper will underline the crucial importance of reviewing, a totally neglected field, and offer a thumb rule account of what an ideal reviewer could do or hope to achieve. Examples will be cited from published pieces to substantiate aspects of bad reviewing while signalling features that could act as constituents of a good review.
Keywords: Translation, Critics, Reviewer, Cultural Context, Textual tradition

The problems that the translators of books from English to other Indian languages face, including being almost ignored totally by reviewers, however irritating, is not a new phenomenon. This paper intends to demonstrate this by going to the archives and showing how the reviewers of the earliest review journals in England acted towards translations and translators from Greek, Latin and on very few occasions from other European languages. Even the mighty were not spared. So, nothing has really changed about the reviewers, they condescend to refer to the translator only when they want to comment on the deplorable work done, otherwise what one gets is a brief, laudatory essay on the original, complete with footnotes! It is as if the intermediary, the translator, does not exist, he is an absent presence. Yes, reviewers have never changed, at least until now, but the healthy trend is that the translators and the reading public have started to exchange opinions directly, leaving the now outsiders, the reviewers, out of the picture in several cases.
Keywords: Translation, Translators, Reviewers, English literature, Rewriting

This paper will attempt a theorisation of my experience of translation and reviewing. I have about a dozen reviews of translations into Telugu from other languages and about a half dozen of them of translations from Telugu to English. I want to add my own experience as a translator to these ideas as a reviewer. Among my foci are faithfulness and creativity in translation, cultural roots of the original text and differences of a target language audience, reviewer’s general rigidity in looking at the translation from either of these two.
Keywords: Translation, Reviewer, Theorisation, Telugu, English

This paper focuses on why translations should be reviewed differently from original writings. What are the different ways in which a translation is usually reviewed? Is there really a best way to read a translation? Is it necessary for a reviewer to know the source language? Why should the reviewer be translation-sensitive? The paper draws on experiences of the author as an editor of a review magazine ¾ ‘Indian Review of Books’ ¾ which regularly reviewed literatures in translation.
Keywords: Translation, Original writings, Source language, Reviewers, Translator

A book review calls for a number of points of information that most critics seem to accept. But when the subject of a review is a translation, there is a new angle of commentary that has shown the most diverse of opinions and positions that vary from the absence of mention of the fact that the work under review is a translation going through the passing comment about the fact that the book is a translation to the almost obsessive nitpicking about each and every aspect of every turn of phrase. But what constitutes a good translation review depends on a number of parameters attendant on its intended audience. This paper will attempt to outline a certain typology of criticism of translations and deliberate whether a methodology of reviewing translations can be established.
Keywords: Translation, Source language, Reviews, Indian Literature

Phakir Mohan Senapati (1843-1918) was a versatile genius of modern Oriya literature and also the father of Oriya autobiography. His autobiography ‘a:tmaji:bancarita’ has been translated by two different translators into English. It was John Boulton of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, who first translated it as ‘My Times and I’ in 1985. Later Jatindra K. Nayak and Prodeepta Das have translated it again with the title ‘Story of My Life’ in1997. But what is surprising is that Nayak and Das have not even written a foreword to their translation when it is expected of them to state as to why they undertook the task of translating the book again when a translation was already available. So we thought it would be a fruitful exercise to compare, review, and conduct a readability test which would evaluate both the translations.
Keywords: Translation, linguistic strategies, Equivalence, Spelling, Review

This paper attempts to address, as exhaustively as possible, all the questions pertaining to the act of reviewing translations. For most it provides detailed likely answers, including both sides of each issue (the translator’s and the reviewer’s). In addition, it attempts to identify some of the major areas in which (a) translators may have to alter their attitude or work or both so that reviewers can (will be forced to) do their job better, and (b) publishers of books, magazines and newspapers need to change so as to bring about a better reviewing atmosphere. The paper also links the reviewing of translations to the general reviewing culture in India, because the former inherits some of the basic flaws of the latter. More importantly than almost anything else the paper proposes, it aims to emphasize the principle that much remains to be improved in the culture of translation itself.
Keywords: Translation, Translator, Reviewers, Source language,

Using the exchange of the review and response of the recent translation of the classic Telugu play, ‘Kanyasulkam’ by Vijayasree and Vijay Kumar, this paper attempts to demonstrate the crying need for a very sensitive approach towards reviewing of translated works that would draw out the best from the translator’s and the original writer’s efforts to preserve the cultural uniqueness and specificity through semantic-cultural adaptation.
Keywords: Translation, Kanyasulkam, Telugu literature, adaptation

The activity of translation is not confined only to transferring from one language to another but it also involves socio-cultural aspects. If these aspects play an important role in the process of translation, then it becomes a prerequisite for the translator to have not only knowledge of both the languages but also some understanding of socio-cultural reality of both the traditions—of the source and the target. This may apply to the reviewers as well, as they not only study both but come out with judgments on the translation which includes all these aspects. In order to explain this position, I would like to share my own experience as a translator of a collection of Tribal Folktales from Oriya to English. I would like to argue that in this case, the translator’s proximity to the socio-cultural milieu helped a great deal in translating the collection.
Keywords: Translation, Tribal folktales, Oriya language, Communities, Cultural practices