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As a practicing translator, I have experienced /arrived at a
few points: |
| (1) |
The stylistic outfit of the original text is a result/final
product of the interweaving of all the kinds of elements
used in it-words, phrases and so on. That is to say, the
style of the original text consists in the pattern in
which the words, sentences, phrases, etc., are arranged.
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| (2) |
The
use of literary devices such as metaphors, similes, idioms
and so on, contribute to this 'style'. |
| (3) |
To
speak particularly of Mohanty's Harijana, the author
'style' is distinct distinguishable, the various aspects
of which and its reasons will be delineated further down
in this paper. |
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Certainly, style denotes, connotes, and
leads to innumerate other ideas, points and so on that fastidious
students and stalwarts of literary stylistic analysis and
discourse have already outlined in their volumes. My intention
in the above said three points is not to sum up such expert
notions of style; I have merely tried to express in the
simplest terms what the style of the original text means
to me, insofar as any discourse in translation is concerned.
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This
being the case does the efficient translator not try to convert
the original text into another text in a different language,
which should read exactly like an original text in that language,
though it is not the same? The translator's task is, then, to
take the content of a certain mould, and place it in another,
so prudently and perhaps 'diplomatically', that it is not distorted
even to the slightest extent, and at the same time, undergoes
a few changes to get accommodated in its new mould, thereby
producing the impression of being an original text on the mind
of the intended audience. This 'prudent carrying over' of content,
we at times fail to realize, involves a good deal of creative
energy. One may ask here: how? I shall explicate this question
further in this paper. |
| I
shall first present a number of illustrations to explain how
I have been obliged to make changes in Mohanty's 'style' while
translating Harijana into English. |
| 1. |
This
novel focuses parallelly on the life of scavengers and that
of people of the so-called 'high-society'. The characters in
the scavengers' slum, however, form the main body of it. It
concentrates on the miserable life lead by scavengers, and zeroes
in on the poor vis-à-vis that of the rich. The poor and
downtrodden, represented by the scavengers, are far less opportune
when compared with the rich, capitalist class signified by the
two well-to-do families in the town, who dwell in a chic atmosphere.
The language used by the uneducated scavengers, thus, differs
from the standard version of the Oriya language, generally used
the above said richer class. The language used by the former
consists of more slang, phrases and idioms than that of the
latter. One example of this is the following: |
The
scavengers here use a lot of idiomatic expressions in their
speeches. While translating these, I had three options: to omit
these altogether, to translate them into plain sentences and
to find a corresponding idiom in English. The first option I
ruled out in almost all cases because that may lead to taking
away from the content. There have been some cases where a gap
seemed to exist; the idiomatic phrase/sentence did not have
an exactly corresponding one-an equivalent-in English. In such
cases, how could that unit of expression containing that particular
idiom, be transferred into the receptor language, its content
remaining undisturbed? The solution I adapted was this: the
content of that phrase/sentence was picked and was embedded
into another sentence-in the receptor language- the form of
which was as close as possible to the original. |
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