Translation Studies: Its Retrospect and Prospect.

Biswa Ranjan Sahoo

PhD Student

Utkal University, Bhubaneswar

In my paper I would like to discuss translation in India and its drawbacks. Before coming to my discussion I would like to give a brief account of translation in India. The history of translation can be traced back to translations from Sanskrit. Sanskrit texts were translated into various indigenous languages. But the seed of translation of native language into colonizers was sowed in colonial time because of their interest to know the language of their colony- not out of their interest but for their political convenience. It led colonizers to keep some English educated Indians for English translation of Indian languages. It was primarily done orally, the translator acted as a media (or translating software in modern technical connotation) of message transfer. The emergence of Mahatma Gandhi on the political scenario boosted the literary translation of works of Tagore, Premchand, K.M. Munshi, Fakir Mohan Senapati in all Indian languages.  The translation of these eminent writers into English is indeed a very late endeavour in the fall of 20^th century and early 21^st century. Moreover Tagore self translated Gitanjali into English.

This delay does not show the inability of the Indian translators to translate into English rather the horde of problems they meet. Translation, after all, is a communicative activity which involves the transfer of meaning from one language to another and to get at the meaning of archaic word is not an easier task. In not finding proper replacement of words translator gets stuck as he faces the double dilemma of loosing the original sense of expression and worldwide intelligibility. Sometimes even the great translators fail to render the exact sense of text and try to dilute the meaning with meek substitutions. Here I dare to quote an original paragraph from section-8 titled as Zamindar Sekh Dildar Mian of Chha Mana Atha Guntha (1902):

“Vetira daba talapatra khandikare lekha thila, padhagala- panchata oliare saru arua bharane atha nauti, mugajai dui oliare batris nauti, haradjai eka oliaku athar nauti, ghia eka mathiaku pachis sera, bantala kathia kadali pancha kandhi, pachila kadali dui kandhi, alu atha bisa.”

This is translated into English in the translated text Six Acres and a Third (2005) as:

“The list of gifts, inscribed in a pail leaf, was then read out: five baskets of fine- grained rice; one bharana and eight nautis of mung dal, and thirty two nautis of toor dal, in the two baskets; twenty-five seers of ghee, in an earthen vessel; five hands of green cooking bananas; and eight bisas of potatoes.”

Think how the message proper is diluted while translated into English. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales if translated into English loses most of the marked peculiarities of source language. The inadequacy of translation is due to the irrefutable fact that it is very difficult to get equivalents at all linguistics levels. The English expression for ‘Good morning’, ‘Good night’ etc. have no equivalent in Hindi or in native language. The substitution ‘Namaste’ can at best a vague substitute. The Odia ‘Kali’, on the other hand is can be used either for ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’ of English. In Odia, ‘mamu’, ‘dada’, ‘chacha’, ‘kaka’, ‘mausa’ have only one equivalent ‘uncle’. The problem is evident when Fakir Mohan Senapati’s novel Mamu(1913) is translated into English: Krishna Mohan Acharya translates it into ‘MAMU The Uncle’ (1997) and Jatindra Kumar Nayak does it ‘The maternal uncle’ (2007)a reconciling substitute of Odia Mamu-mother’s brother. Similarly B.K Das translates approximately Gopinath Mohanty’s Danapani (1955) to The Survivor (1995).

Idioms and proverbs also pose great problems in working out translation of one language into another. It would be disastrous to reproduce an idiom literally. The best option would be an attempt to approximate to the spirit of idiom so as to maintain a peculiar quality of source language. For example Odia phrases like ‘ati garbe hata lanka’can hardly be substituted as ‘too much of anything is good for nothing.

The translator has to cope by cultural barriers other than linguistics as the languages represent two cultures. Let’s consider Yajnaseni (1984) of Pratibha Ray when translated into English as Yajnaseni-The story of Draupadi diminishes the cultural eminence.  The Indian concern with self respect, public image or a social face or the concern of fidelity, chastity even marrying five husbands at a time- are deeply ingrained social concepts very incompatible with western culture. “Even in Bharatendu’s Durlabha Bandhu, a translated version of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the casket scene for winning the hands of Portia is inconsistent with typical Indian ethos. The Jew sect of Shylock in England is synonymous with a heartless cruel sect of traders where as the Jain sect of Shailaksha in Bharatendu’s version has no such associations”. (Jahan 2004:74)

Translating poetry is comparatively a difficult task than translating novels. Poetry creates non logical patterns with the help of meter, rhyme and rhetoric so that connotative where as prose fiction is denotative and logical. K.R.S Iyengar states: “Poetry by its very nature is untranslatable. Ideas can be translated from language to language, but poetry is the idea touched with magic of phrase and incantatory music” and Sri Aurobindon advocates “the poetical translation should intend not to reproduce the words exactly, but the image associations and poetical beauty and the flavor of original work.”

Nandakishor Bal’s Banapriya a translation of P.B. Shelly’s To a Skylark is symmetric in meaning and thematic expression but lacks the powerful expression of a quotable quote “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts”.  Even Madhusudan Rao while translating Keats’ phrase ‘A thing of beauty is joy for ever’ broadens himself in saying ‘Sundare truptira abasada nahin jete dekhuthile nua disu thai’. Rao understood the sense, connotation but could not resist himself to broaden his view on the aesthetic concept.

To conclude, I state Rabindranath Tagore’s formulation of ‘Vishwa- Sahitya’ or world literature which can be best realized in pursuance of what we call ‘comparative literature’. Here I reiterate the words of Susan Basnett that “translation study is the future of comparative literature”. So translation study, although it has certain loop holes, represents us to a new horizon of literary study. I hope more systematic rules will be formulated and more scholarly works, researches, seminars, symposiums workshops will be conducted for a wide acceptance of translation study as a literary discipline and career.  

Select Bibliography

Jahan, Rahmat. Comparative Literature: a Case of Shaw and Bharatendu. New Delhi: Sarup and

            Sons P, 2004, Print.

Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. Translation Studies. London: Routledge, 1991, Print.

Das, B Kumar, Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2002, 

            Print.