LANGUAGE IN INDIA

PRACTICING LITERARY TRANSLATION
A SYMPOSIUM BY MAIL - ROUND 9
Moderator : V. V. B. Rama Rao, Ph.D.

Literary Translation – Art or Science?

Before taking up again the thread of ‘Compensation’ in continuation of Round Eight, let me provide a quick recap at what I tried to put across in an essay in this journal -- ‘Literary Translation - Art or Science,’ in May 2005 issue, http://www.languageinindia.com/may2005/raotranslation1.html.

It was my attempt to state that applied linguistics could be a tool to assess literary translation. Examples were given of the English renderings of the great Tirukkural. The three samples were from the renderings of Manickavasagam (Richa 2004), Mahajan (Sahitya Akademi 1979 and Rev G.U.Pope (Oxford 1886).

Selected kurals were reproduced in a kind of broad transcription for those who know Tamil. Each rendering was marked with asterisks by way of marking, one to indicate “Communicative,’ two to indicate “Appealing, Artistic,” and three to indicate “Impressive, Artistic, Memorable.” These markings were based on a broad and quick linguistic analysis, while saying that these are no value judgements and all renderings did serve a valuable function.

Professor Suresh Kumar’s Hypothesis of the Law of Compensation

Now to Professor Suresh Kumar’s tentative hypothesis towards a “Law of Compensation.” It is not a scientific law like the laws of Nature but more ‘probabilistic.’ Translation losses are ‘gaps,’ a concomitant feature of communication. But a practitioner succeeds in spite of gaps because there is compensation too found by perceptive readers who make use of literary analysis within their reach.

Of the three possibilities of the rendering being inferior, superior or at par with the source text, the third is usually attempted and achieved when the concept of compensation is applied. The meaning of the source text in its various modes within the text-world may vary from practitioner to practitioner and this is easily appreciated within the scope of Discourse Analysis, which talks about the ‘situatedness,’ ‘context’ of the literary text.

Literary Translation -- From One Bhasha into Another Bhasha, From One Language into a Bhasha

Talking of Literary Translation from a bhasha into English or vice versa, the idea of ‘loss’ and ‘compensation’ may be relevant since one of the languages involved is not a bhasha (an Indian Language).

Murray’s rendering of the original Hindi poem, Professor Suresh Kumar showed, did not suffer loss since there has been ‘compensation’ for the English reader, who may not have had enough exposure to any bhasha.

When the language of both the ST and the TT happen to be bhashas there may not be any losses as such and hence no compensation either.

But a statement like this is not valid till sufficient proof is adduced to justify this hypothesis.

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V. V. B. Rama Rao

The Morphodynamics of Bengali Compounds - Decomposing Them for Lexical Processing | The Ringed Realities | In Search of Identity - A Case Study of Tamil Christians | Practicing Literary Translation: A Symposium Round 9 | The English Language Teacher's Awareness and Perceptions | Technology for Indic Scripts - A User Perspective | HOME PAGE OF JULY 2006 ISSUE | HOME PAGE | CONTACT EDITOR