Dialectal Peculiarities of Indian Text and Context in Translation Practice: A Critique

Abstract

Translation from one language to another is a continual phenomenon but when translation takes place between regional literary texts and English, it tends to call certain translational choices at two levels. On the first level, to decipher out the nuances of the original, the translator has to delve deep to know more than what is written on linguistic level in the original and then the possible effective expression of it into the TL follows on the other level. The present paper analyses the same exemplifying the short stories of Maitreyi Pushpa, a Hindi author, who writes in dialectal variation of Hindi pertinent to the region where the stories have been set. Maitreyi Pushpa's fondness of using the varieties and derivations of kinship terms, reduplicated forms and compound words, regional cultural rituals and other specific lexical peculiarities etc. have been analysed in the process of translation and it is found that the conflict for finding the closest possible equivalents rather needs some integrated approach to analyse it in the cultural context and situation. Looking at the ideological and thematic details of Indian literary texts, it has also been found that translations bring forth the Indian perspectives and landscape of these widely discussed ideologies viz. the grim face of Indian feminism in Pushpa's writings.