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Somsukla
Banerjee
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Somsukla Banerjee is a
research scholar working for her PhD in
the school of Humanities and Social Sciences
in the Indian institute of Technology, Kanpur.
She is reachable at the e-mail id of: somsukla@iitk.ac.in
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t is a well-known fact that literary translation
contributes a great deal to the cultural communication between
speakers of different languages. However a literary text is not merely communication of information
and
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therefore the
translation of a literary text is unsuccessful if it solely
aims at reproducing chunks of information from the original
text.
It
is widely accepted that the style of a mature and distinguished
author in a literary text manifests his consummate creativeness.
It is important that the translation of a literary text should
aspire to produce a certain impact on the reader by trying
to reproduce the style of the original text.
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Translators and translation theorists have
always been concerned with the evaluation of a translated
work. It has often been said that a good translation is
one which successfully renders the rhythm, the connotations
and the rhetorical devices used in the source text. If we
apply literary stylistics to examine a literary translation
it will be noted that the stylistic analysis of the original
text in terms of aesthetically and/or thematically motivated
linguistic choices will enable the translators to be more
sensitive to the artistic value of the original text and
select functional equivalents in translating to achieve
stylistic equivalence.
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Due to personal interest in fictional translation
the author of this paper will make a tentative exploration
of stylistic equivalents in translations of modern Hindi
fiction by analysing two English versions of a short story
by Mannu Bhandari titled Nayak Khalnayak Vidushak
and discuss the deceptive equivalence in the two English
versions so that we can find some solutions to the problems
in the translation of creative fiction, and some principles
to help improve the translation.
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Stylistic
Equivalence in Translation:
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Equivalence
has always been a keyl concept in literary translation. However
it has also occupied a seat of controversy in translation
research. Catford defines translation as the replacement of
textual material in one language (SL) by equivalent textual
material in another language (TL). He holds that the central
problem of translation practice is that of finding TL translation
equivalents (Catford, 1965: 20-21). While discussing the nature
of translating, Eugene Nida points out that translating consists
in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural
equivalent of source-language message, first in terms of meaning
and second in terms of style. He emphasizes that the translator
must strive for equivalence rather than identity. (Nida and
Taber (1969): 12) |
