STRATEGIES USED IN THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS OF THE SHORT STORY “TEN RUPEES”

Abstract

This study aims to find out the different translation strategies used in the translation of cultural expressions of the short story “Ten Rupees” written by Saadat Hasan Manto and translated into the English language by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad in 2010. The research design of the study is qualitative and quantitative since the aim of the study is to find out the categories of cultural expressions and also to find out the translation strategies used by translators in rendering these cultural words and expressions in the target language. Therefore, the corpus of the study comprises 80 cultural expressions which were randomly selected from the entire short story. To analyze these cultural expressions, Newmark’s distribution of cultural terms and analytical framework is used. The findings of the study show that gestures and habits, which is the fifth category in Newmark’s model, is used the most throughout the text and the least used cultural category is ecology and social organization. In addition, ten different translation strategies were used by translators in rendering the source language Urdu into the target language English. Namely transference, cultural equivalent, functional equivalent, descriptive equivalent, modulation, componential analysis, synonymy, couplets, shifts and transposition, and paraphrasing. Keywords: translation, translation strategies, cultural expressions, Ten rupees, Newmark’s distribution