The paper attempts to explain the concepts of autochthony and rootedness of knowledge in a particular culture and then further explains how the knowledge of one culture may get transmitted to the other cultures. The processes of this ‘deracination’ of knowledge rooted in one culture are not simply a process of transfer of knowledge. Its travel and then implantation in another culture is rather a complex process in which translation plays an important role. Etymologically, the notion of translation itself may be understood as ‘taking (ideas) across’. In history and in contemporary times, this ‘translation’ of knowledge and cultural narratives and texts has been a complex process. This paper aims at understanding some of the intricacies of this process.
Keywords: autochthony, evolution of knowledge, culture, ideas, transformation, translation

The author would like to pose some basic questions about three basic notions in this paper and discuss elaborately about the different aspects and the contribution of various individuals in this regard. In the first, the author will be dealing with technical/general translation versus literary translation and contrasting training. The second question the author will be delving into is about whether there exists a clear boundary between literary translation, adaptation and creative writing or not. The up and downs of illustration in literary translation: the case of French, English and Urdu and, more specifically, the case of Urdu as a target language in the late 19th century would be the third question to be dealt within the paper.
Keywords: translation, French, English, Urdu, 19th century literary translation, Arabian Nights

The purpose of this study is to clarify how similarly certain compound verbs (V1+V2), which are often treated as a complex predicate in the study of South Asian languages, behave in Hindi-Urdu compared to Japanese, a non-cognate language spoken far from the Indian Subcontinent. The first phase of this study involves the investigation, through statistical methods, of second verbs (V2s) in Hindi stories. I use two short stories by Premchand and the screenplay for the famous film In Custody. The results objectively, rather than anecdotally, demonstrate to us non-native Hindi-Urdu speakers the fact that the verbs jānā ‘go’, denā ‘give’, and lenā ‘take’ concatenated to V1 in stem form are used quite frequently within such genres. The second phase of the study involves the analysis of illustrative examples of compatibility between jānā ‘go’ and the Japanese verb shimau ‘put away’, as used in their Japanese translations*
Keywords: Hindi-Urdu, Japanese, comparative study, compound verbs, genres

The focus of my paper is to discuss and search the possible channels of theorising the presupposed ‘enigmatic’ relationship of regional Indian languages with English especially in an undergraduate (B.A.) English classroom. In our present times, the term ‘regional Indian language’ is pitched not only in isolation but also in direct conflict with power languages such as English (in a somewhat similar trend, Sanskrit and Persian in pre-modern times). In fact, regional Indian languages are shown to be ‘valiantly’ fighting the dominance of the cosmopolitan languages such as English with their resistant frames. For instance, a conscious reader of Indian Writing in English will agree that its ‘lacks’ are continuously exposed by the literatures written in regional Indian languages. However, the present paper wishes to challenge this monolithic notion of conflict and dominance and argues that the relationship between regional Indian language(s) and English (translation) is not only opposing but also beneficiary to each other at the same time. For its material, the paper foregrounds the classroom teaching experience of the researcher with multilingual students and hints towards ‘heterographic’2 translation –as (a new) pedagogy of translation.
Keywords: language conflict, translation pedagogy, heterographic translation

This paper presents in brief the methods and strategies that are adapted for translating Hindi texts into Bangla in the project titled ‘Indian Languages Corpora Initiative’ (ILCI), funded by the DeitY, MeitY, Govt. of India. The basic task of translation is done manually by a team of translators (including the present author) who have exhibited good linguistic skill both in Hindi and Bangla language with a clear purpose that the eventual output can be utilized as benchmarked translated texts for machine learning works as well as for teaching translation methodology to new generation of translators. With application of some translation support tools and structured knowledge resources available, the team has translated more than 80000 sentences from Hindi to Bangla. This paper presents some of the problems and challenges that the translators have faced as well as the strategies they have applied to overcome the challenges. Due to brevity of space, I have discussed here some of the representative problems and their possible solutions with an expectation that this may be useful for future tasks of manual and machine translation between the two languages.
Keywords: translation, Hindi, Bangla, lexical replacement, pronoun, equivalence, divergence, copula

Historical novel is a novel that has as its setting a period of history and that attempts to convey the spirit, manners, and social conditions of a past age with realistic detail and fidelity (which is in some cases only apparent fidelity) to historical fact. The work may deal with actual historical personages, or it may contain a mixture of fictional and historical characters. The historical novel Ponniyin Selvan taken for our analysis is a mixture of fictional and historical characters. The events are also both historical and fictional. Translating such a historical novel is a challenge for the translator. Arguably, the barriers to translation of the historical novel from Tamil to English are even higher since the challenges are many which include taking the readers not only to a new language situation but also to a period in the past. Before resorting to translation, the translator has to be sure that the novel to be translated meets the exacting standards of native English readers of historical fiction. The translator Indra Neelameggham who translated the first part of Ponniyin Selvan has done her job with meticulous care. The translated version can be taken as a model to those who resort to translation of historical novels. The strategies adopted by Indra Neelameggham to make her venture palatable to English readers are highly commendable. So it is worth attempting to learn lessons from her translated work.
Keywords: standards, linguistic criteria, stylistic criteria, translational criteria, strategies, retention, compromising

This paper looks into the issues and concerns when a concept like ‘gender’ gets translated into governmental discourses. Taking ‘Unarthupattu’ as a case study, it analyses issues of representation, both textual and visual, in deploying gender as a category in governmental discourses. This paper explores how such usage reaffirms existing gender relations, ideologies and the established order.
Keywords: gender, discourse, representation, feminism

Studies on Dara Shikoh, the heir-apparent in the Mughal Empire of Shah Jahan, have discussed manytimes his life and works playing out a binary on different fronts between his brother Aurangazeb and himself. Some accounts resent Dara as unorthodox and therefore unsafe to certain interests, others draw attention to him as a visionary, poet, dreamer etc. As far as the presentation of his works is concerned, Dara Shikoh could even be compared with the modern day researcher. This paper intends to elaborate on some of these aspects reflected in Dara’s works, especially, the translations.
Keywords: Dara Shikoh, Aurangazeb, Mughals, Sirr-i-Akbar, Upanishads, Risala Haqnuma

Translation is often considered a cultural transformation from one language to another. It is indeed a creative work, a recreation or a ‘reproduction’. The disciplines like Translation Studies, Gender Studies and Cultural Studies are interdisciplinary and researches have been conducted under these approaches. These approaches deal with the notions of gender and culture at large. Gender and culture are socially-constructed phenomena which determine the social identity of an individual. Translations intend to transfer these notions from one culture to another without losing the essence of the previous. Translators are often men who translate as history has shown us. In translation therefore, male translators are of great eminence which arises certain questions: is there any woman translator and their history, have gender-issues historically been neglected or recognized, did different cultural contexts affect gender-conscious awareness in translation, how does gender-conscious translation affect the target texts and the reception of a translated texts and how the identities of the translator and author is politicized? The present paper intends to problematize them. It will simultaneously show how identity is constructed through the politics of language which itself politicises the identities. These aspects would be explored in the light of the views of Sherry Simon, Luise von Flotow and Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak specifically. In other sense, the present paper is more of a critique of Sherry Simon’s ideas supported by von Flotow and Spivak, enlightening the readers of the possibilities of feminist perspective to translation.
Keywords: identity politics, gender, language and translation.

India is a land of diverse communities speaking numerous indigenous tongues. All these communities still have a living tradition of oral narrations. However, due to the failure of inter-generation transfer of the oral narratives in these communities and the lack of an agency that can script their indigenous dialects into written form led to their extinction. Though the linguistics define the term ‘dialect’ distinctively, the present paper uses the plural term ‘dialects’ or ‘tongues’ as synonymous to ‘languages.’ According to G N Devy, who led the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (2010) from the front, there is an urgent need of preventing this future extinction by documenting and translating these oral narratives. Documentation of these narratives for the purpose of translation would create a rich corpus of community literature, and their translation into English (or into the larger Indian languages) would enhance the intercommunity access resulting into a better understanding of these communities. More importantly, their documentation and translation may succeed in preventing the possible extermination of languages and would strengthen the indigenous knowledge systems. This paper tries to suggest a possibility of preventing extinction of indigenous tongues of different communities through documentation for the purpose of translation. It also shows how these translations can reinvigorate the idea of community literature which is in fact vital for literary and geographic identities. It also addresses the problem of translating orality and culture that one may come across in such undertakings.
Keywords: community literature, documentation, translation, orality, culture, identity.

Thinking adaptation metaphorically as traffic - a physical, intercultural mobility in between dialects, geographies and climates accompanying both flows and interruptions; movability and immovability; licit exchange and illicit trades, the proposed paper will try to revisit the term ‘adaptation’ and then will turn towards the Sanskrit/Bengali word “rupāntar” – often synonymously used with the word “adaptation” and make an attempt of equating the ideas of rupāntar and ‘adaptation’ going into the botanic metaphor and viewing it through the prism of the theory of evolution of species as forwarded by Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century. It will pay particular attention on terminological insights of both ‘adaptation’ and rūpāntar and try to understand how they carry the botanic metaphor of ‘plantation’. Taking Shelly’s concept of ‘transplanting seeds’ to be a point of entry, this paper will try to discover the translator/adapter as a ropoka (planter) and attempt to analyze different layers of the botanic metaphor located into the term ropoka. This will be possible because the study of lexicons will unfold a very interesting but hitherto unattended fact that the concept of rūpāntar in Bengali is also related to the idea of ropoṇa or planting besides the well attested meanings like ‘change in form’ and ‘change in beauty’ (Trivedi 2014, Tymoczko 2006).
Keywords: adaptation, rūpāntar, Darwin, plantation, Shelly, botanic, ropoṇa.

Translation strategy means a plan or procedure adopted by the translators to solve the translation problems. The present paper is to highlight on the translation strategies of the non-native Odia translators during the colonial period (1807-1874). First of all, those translators who were non-residents of Odisha and had learnt Odia for specific purposes are considered non-native Odia translators.The first name one of the Odia translators is William Carey (1761-1834), who translated the New Testament or Bible from English to Odia that was subsequently published by the Serampore Mission Press Calcutta in 1807. A master craftsman of Christian theology and an Odia translator of missionary literature, Amos Sutton (1798-1854), who translated John Bunyan’s (1628-1688) the Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) to Odia under the titled swargiya jātrira brutānta in 1838. Sutton served as an Odia translator under the British government. His religious, literary, and linguistic contributions to Odia language and literature are to be studied for making a concrete idea about the development of Odia prose. In the era of Odia translation discourse, his translations deserve to be studied in the theoretical frame of translation strategies. In this paper, the following translation strategies like linguistic strategies, literal translation strategy, lexical alteration strategy, deletion, exoticism and cultural transposition strategies are predominately adopted by the translators. Since the objectives of the SLTs were to promote religious evangelization and second language learning, the translation strategies tried to preserve the religious and pedagogical fidelity rather that textual fidelity in the translated texts.
Keywords:translation strategy, missionary literature, non-native odia translators, exoticism and cultural transposition

It is observed that creativity is all about negotiating through subjective experiences and transcending them to make a crucial connect with the readers. The process of translation follows the same route. This would involve a lot of enterprise especially since she is constricted by the existing framework of the source text. Other than linguistic experiments, a translator, if he/she wills, can subtly modify or brazenly rewrite a text in agreement with her ideology and context. But what happens when a writer translates his/her own work? Even when the question of accountability to the writer does not plague the self-translator, self-translation many times ends up as some kind of rewriting of the existing text. But does self-translation by default mean rewriting? In my paper I would analyse the first chapter of The Legends of Khasak, the English translation of O. V. Vijayan’s phenomenal Malayalam novel Khasakkinte Ithihasam by the writer himself. A close reading of the text would reveal that there are many subtle changes Vijayan has brought in the translation. What does this do to the text and what does this say about the writer as his own translator? This analytical paper would attempt to answer these questions and thus comment on the process and politics of self-translation as rewriting.
Keywords: self-translation, Malayalam novel, O. V. Vijayan, The Legends of Khasak.

This paper will draw a comparison between a traveller and a translator since both deal with a world of otherness which they strive to bring to the readers. Both the traveller and the translator also make an effort to convince the readers about the authenticity of their narrative. This becomes important because in travel writing and in translations the narrative is mediated through the subjective presence of a travel writer or a translator. As such the activities are considered notoriously manipulative since the act of (re)presenting (an)other depends majorly on how the traveller-translator deploys language. It is in telling the tales of his experience that a traveller-translator involves his own subjective understanding of the lands and cultures which he sees and experiences exclusively in his own way. But this subjectivity of the traveller or translator gets suppressed under the pretext of what Lawrence Venuti calls “fluency ideal”. Thus a traveller-translator has to create an impression on the readers that the stories they are reading are exactly the ones that are experienced by the denizens of the “other” world otherwise s/he is regarded as treacherous, a threat to the native culture and language contaminating it with foreign elements. This is why they suffer from an anxiety and a compulsion to establish the veracity of their account. This paper deals with a translation of Gulliver’s Travels in Bengali titled Apūrba Deś Bhraman, the first part of which was named Abākpūrī Darśan (1876), an example of a translated (pseudo) travel-writing to show how a traveller-translator deals with the issue of visibility and language. Is it possible for the translator to become visible? This paper shows how the narrative itself becomes a space for the traveller-translator in which he reclaims his subjectivity deploying language and thereby dealing with the issue of authenticity and invisibility.
Keywords: translator, traveller, authenticity, invisibility, subjectivity.

The paper focuses on the translation of a dramatic text from English to Kannada. The paper discusses George Bernard Shaw’s English play Pygmalion (1914) along with its translation in Kannada titled Mysura Malli (Malli of Mysore, 1963) by Kerodi Gundu Rao. This paper tries to explore primarily the ways in which Pygmalion has been translated or adapted, the translation strategies deployed by the translator, the changes wrought in and reasons, techniques of domestication and the cultural aspects that determine the translation. The study considers the translation strategies of foreignization and domestication to answer the question on how they are important aspects in translation process in translating a text from English to Kannada, why the translator thought it was important and why he brought changes in terms of plot, characterization, language and environment. The study also looks into the literary functions of the translation in the Kannada literary culture.
Keywords:source-text, target-text, domestication, foreignization, culture.

This paper discusses the various dilemmas faced by the translator while translating Shanta Kumar’s Hindi novel Lajjo. Taking instances from the translation, the research had involved a comparative analysis of transactions that had taken place between the languages involved. An attempt is made to explain the problematic aspects of this translation and their solutions. Since Hindi and English operate differently at linguistic, expressive, cognitive, geographical and socio-cultural levels, it requires a great deal of diligence and understanding to resolve the dilemmas of translation. This research is possibly the first ever attempt to problematise the translation process involving a Kangri-Hindi text and hence it is believed that the mini theories, so generated will add to the overall understanding of translation phenomena.
Keywords: dilemma, language, choice, equivalence, meaning.

This paper offers a semiotic model of interpretation of metaphors used in the Charyapada—a collection of Buddhist religious verses in Bangla composed between tenth and twelfth centuries. Drawing from conflicting attributions of concealment through sandhyabhasha or twilight language and revelation through sandhayabhasha or intentional speech as the primary function of the verses, I propose a Peircean threefold model of reading their metaphors as iconic, indexical and symbolic. A.K. Ramanujan’s adoption of the Peircean tripartite classification for translation types serves as the frame of reference.
Keywords: metaphors, sandhayabhasha, iconic, indexical, symbolic.

Some of the early works in modern Hindi and Urdu, like many other modern Indian languages, were produced by the missionaries and by the scholars at the college of Fort William. The College not only attempted to procure manuscripts but also appointed native scholars to produce texts in Hindustani. These texts were intended to be used to train the (non)commissioned company officers and ‘men of the British army’, serving in Bengal and Bombay presidencies, in the native languages. Of all these texts Premsagar and Bagh-O-Bahar occupy a significant place not only because they were prescribed texts to teach the officials but also because they seem to have introduced two particular ways of using Hindustani. Bagh-O-Bahar was originally written in Persian under the title Ghasseh-e Chahar Darvesh [The Tale of the Four Dervishes] by the 13th century poet Amir Khusro and it was translated into ‘Urdu’ by Mir Amman, an employee at the Fort William College. Later, it was translated into English by Duncan Forbes in 1857. Similarly, Premsagar was translated by Lalluji Lal in 1810 as Premsagar or The History of Krishn according to the Tenth Chapter of Bhagubut of Vyasudev. He translated it from ‘Braj Bhasha of Chaturbhuj Mishra’ into Hindi. In this article, I wish to look at different translations of the two works and the purposes they served in the nineteenth century. I will also attempt to understand how these translations contributed to a debate around ‘national language’ at that time.
Keywords: national language, Bagh-O-Bahar, Hindustani, Urdu.

Research question what this paper tries to address is the role of translation in imagining nation and national literature in Indian context from a bhasha perspective. This paper argues that a partial history of literary translation can be proposed from the act of imagining national literature in a certain language. Research in this subject concerns on the history of literary translation by the government and non-government publishing houses, academic disciplines and academic activities like seminar, conferences, symposium, workshops etc. as the stepping stones for imagining nation through translation. This paper took quite a few examples of above mentioned literary activities to propose a history of translation as well as the history of Indian literature in a bhasha context.
Keywords: Indian literature, nation, national literature, historiography, bangla translation, ecology of translation.

There is a rich and old tradition of translation in India. The advent of the British and the establishment of the British rule in India is an important epoch in the history of translation in India. Indian translation has been enriched by the translations done by several translators from English into Indian languages and vice-versa. This paper aims to look the tradition of translation in Maharashtra in the last two hundred years. There is a special significance this period because it is in this age that the activity of translation in Maharashtra took a new turn.
Keywords: translation, Indian languages, Marathi, Maharashtra.

This paper deals with the evaluation of translation assignments at the beginner’s level. The challenges in assessment of translation assignments stem firstly from the fact that translation is a highly complicated activity and secondly, from the fact that at the beginner’s level the errors in translation are not visible to the learners who are yet to be initiated into the science of translation. The author introduces a framework of assessment which identifies not only the errors in the translation and draws the learner’s attention to its gravity by assigning negative points but also sensitises the learner to what is being done correctly by rewarding the good translation practices of the learner with positive points. This balanced approach to assessment aims at covering all common translation errors of learners as well as providing them with the necessary vocabulary to identify them so that there can be a meaningful discussion in class.
Keywords: translation errors, good translation practices, framework of assessment, learner-centred assessment.

Concept of original and need of faithfulness or equivalence are questionable in the case of subaltern (Dalit text translations in Indian context), while it is seen that parallel texture and content rewriting are claimed by their translators and editors. Indigenous language and its texture are said to be interwoven with the native life, but it also compromises advancement with time and place, oral traditions and formal or informal literacy imbibed in their jargon and creoles. Equal sensibility, empathy like words are concurrently used in academic discussions to evaluate their translation. Anyhow exotic strategies applied to any other text-translation are applicable here also. If a writer herself does both the original and translation, these linguistic and textual constraints can be said to be negotiated, but never sensitized. Normally, the practice accepted is to convince the first author and then the process is undertaken on a mutual consent. Instead of the practice of searching for equivalents and prepare para-texts, translation can only be an act of undermining the narratives of Dalit, as this raised by people concerned. Adaptation techniques are only forwarded, which cannot be considered as negative at contexts. Similarly the confusions and lack of coherence realized by Dalits are also points to be looked into. The duality of outsider-insider still persists in academic discussions, whereas the political divide enlarged over the time and again which posit isolation tactics under the same scanner. Representational tactics practiced by political and administrative sectors also add fuel to the discriminative forces. Politically motivated inclusion strategies give way to the cultural and representational divide and keep indirect exclusion within the whole act of implementation. Without unfolding this caste based or representational identity, no step of official implementation is happening around. More clearly, it is agreements and mutual adjustments which render a feeling of representation, but enlarge the divide or exclusion in new but more appropriate ways. Now this paper will be looking into the same practice, interwoven in writing and rewriting.
Keywords: Dalit epistemology, powerful language, mirror images, heterogeneous culture, otherness.

Subtitles and their translation entail linguistic, cultural and technical issues both in theory and practice of Audiovisual Translation. Subtitled films reach heterogeneous audience in different languages and hence raise questions of their reception in terms of the culture specific references, regionally connoting words and verbal humor which are substantial in the source language. The communication of these elements through subtitles plays a crucial role in the meaning making process of a film. This paper is an attempt to analyze the subtitles of the Malayalam film ‘Adaminta Makan Abu’ (Abu, Son of Adam) to understand the possibilities of cultural transfer taking place in the translation and reception of its subtitles.
Keywords: audiovisual translation, subtitling, culture-specific references.