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TRANSLATION AS SUCH, IN THIRD WORLD CONTEXT Tharun Kurian Alex (Horizon Above And Beyond- Anthology of Research Papers Pages 140-156) Ideology and Politics in Translation In earlier times, translation was considered as derivative or copy, and translator as a ‘device’ replacing the linguistic codes or equivalents from one language into another. The recent studies show a shift in the focus to the issues of translator and subjectivity of his/her translation. The idea of absolute equivalence and the author’s superiority over the translator has now become questions asked by theoreticians and translators alike. This change is the result of “increasing awareness of complexity of translation process “(Vijayaraghavan, 187) as translation is no longer considered as a process of transferring words from one text to another in any simple way. Behind every selection that a translator makes; in addition, omission, choice and placement of words or phrases, there is a “voluntary act that reveals his/her history and the socio-

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Page 1: Web viewTRANSLATION AS SUCH, IN THIRD WORLD CONTEXT. Tharun Kurian Alex (Horizon Above And Beyond- Anthology of Research Papers Pages 140-156) Ideology and Politics in Translation

TRANSLATION AS SUCH, IN THIRD WORLD CONTEXT

Tharun Kurian Alex

(Horizon Above And Beyond- Anthology of Research Papers Pages 140-156)

Ideology and Politics in Translation

In earlier times, translation was considered as derivative or copy, and translator as a ‘device’

replacing the linguistic codes or equivalents from one language into another. The recent

studies show a shift in the focus to the issues of translator and subjectivity of his/her

translation. The idea of absolute equivalence and the author’s superiority over the translator

has now become questions asked by theoreticians and translators alike. This change is the

result of “increasing awareness of complexity of translation process “(Vijayaraghavan, 187)

as translation is no longer considered as a process of transferring words from one text to

another in any simple way.

Behind every selection that a translator makes; in addition, omission, choice and placement

of words or phrases, there is a “voluntary act that reveals his/her history and the socio-

political milieu that surrounds”, which is nothing other than the culture and ideology.

Translation was mainly studied on the basis of linguistic approaches and concepts which led

to the failure in recognizing the concept of ideology in translation, because the linguistic

approaches focus on the textual forms other than the social values in translation.

A new trend of research named Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) exposes

ideological forces that underlie communicative exchanges like translation. CDA theorists are

of the opinion that any language use including translation is ideological, which is evident

even in the choice of the source text and the use to which target text is put (skopos or purpose

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of translation) which differ on the basis of “interests, aims and objectives of social agents”

(Vijayaraghavan, 188).

The term ‘ideology’ is defined as a system of ideas and ideals, one which forms the

basis of economic or political theory and policy (Oxford English Dictionary). Translation

scholars are of the opinion that translating itself is a political act, which are linked with the

concepts of power relations and dominations (Vijayaraghavan, 188). Andre Lefevere claimed

that what determined translation was “firstly ideology and then poetics, with language

coming in the third place only” (Munday, 95). Translation is engulfed in social and

ideological structures and therefore it cannot be considered as a “transparent, neutral and

innocent philological activity” (Munday, 95) because theories like postcolonial and feminist

face of translation and the literary politics of the translator brings the genre close to politics.

A translator’s ideology and position will be included in any work s/he translates and the role

of the translator in the context of cultural change, political discourse and identity formation in

different contexts.

Politics in translation is evident in the idea of fluency of translation especially from

third-world languages into English, where ‘fluency’ erases the otherness of the foreign text

by a forcible taming of the original text that cause harmful consequences to the translation as

well as to the intention and idea behind the source text. The postcolonial novel Wide

Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys can be seen as a political translation, because she makes use of

the settings and characters of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and the colonial rule of the British

over the African world, Jamaica to be precise.

Jean Rhys gives life to the fictional character of mad woman in the attic. This novel,

which offers a postcolonial reading of a colonial text, is a political back translation with

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evident socio-cultural and political dimension and portrays specific colonial-postcolonial as

well as authorial ideology.

The concept of ideology can also be defined as “a set of ideas which organize our

lives and help us understand the relation to our environment (Vijayaraghavan, 188). Ideology

and politics of translation will be evident in the process and product of translation such as the

content of source text, its relevance to the receptor audience, the speech acts in the source text

and those which addresses the target audience. The ideology and politics of translation is

present not only in the text, but in the “voicing and stance of the translator, and its relevance

to the receiving audience” (Vijayaraghavan,189). When a translator takes a text from one

language to another, s/he is analysing and interpreting it at the same time, because language

is always associated with meaning and interpretation. A translator cannot exist or furnish in a

‘mental vacuum’ and a translated text produce a new world from human reality which might

or might not be manipulated to represent a meaning. The understanding of a text involves

tracing a circle from text to the author’s biography and historical circumstances, and

interpretation reconstructs the world in which text was produced.

Poststructuralist textuality redefines the idea of equivalence by saying that every text

has plurality of meaning, and loss and gain occurs in translation. Similarly, there will be

contradictions between authorial intentions and translator’s intention. Ideology in translation

is related with culture; both source culture and target culture and the politics of the texts will

be based on the socio-cultural relation. The Greek texts was seen as superior while translated

into Roman tongue and then to European languages and this ideology is evident in Dryden’s

translation of Homer but the colonial mind set towards Arabian translation was that towards a

slave; an approach evident in Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam. The same

can be seen in the case of a multilingual society like India. Here, the intra-lingual translations

take place with differences as can be stated in the case of Malayalam, the language spoken by

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Keralites. Malayalam is spoken with dialectical variations and therefore certain articulations

result in the misinterpretation of the concept. For example, the phrase “chadichu kalayuka”

used in the northern part of Kerala means to throw away, but the same phrase in central

Kerala means to make something jump out. Similarly, in Tamil, the phrase used to denote

/my son/ is “naan petta pullai”. This phrase is used irrespective of gender by both father and

mother and a literal translation of this phrase would invite the attention of the translator to

make use of his idea if he/she is not accustomed much with the cultural and language pattern

of the source language. Thus, ideological and political influence in the field of translation is

present in all the cases of translation.

Postcolonial Brazilian Theory

Postcolonial translation includes rise in ideological consequences of the translation of

third world literature into the language of power, which is English in most cases, and the

tensions between them which might eliminate the identity of politically less powerful

individuals and cultures, and unite the third-world in emotion and thought. In The Politics of

Translation, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak points out that ‘politics of translation’ gives space

to English and other hegemonic languages of the ex-colonies (Munday, 134), and the

translations into these languages fail to translate the difference of the third world view

because, the translator makes compromises in his work so that the western reader could

access the content. Postcolonial studies focus on the “issues of transnational, translation and

colonization” (Munday,134). Translation was one major tool used by colonialism to distort

the cultural images of the colonized so the colonies would become a copy of the colonizer,

even though suppressed, and with identities imitative and inferior.

Translation studies and postcolonial studies are linked at power relations. Literary

translation is one area, the others being education, theology, historiography and philosophy

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where the third world is still under the clutches of colonialism. It is so because they make use

of the hegemonic apparatus that belong to the ideological structure of colonial rule.

Translation by colonial powers, especially into English was mainly used to reconstruct an

image of ‘East’ which appease the ‘West’ and their ideological values. Tejaswani Niranjana

says that “translation as a practice took shape under the colonial power relations and its

operations” (Munday,134). A postcolonial translator analyses every aspect of colonialism and

liberal nationalism so as to “dismantle the hegemonic West from within” (Munday, 135),

deconstructing it and then identifying the means by which the “West represses the Rest” and

marginalize East. In postcolonial translation, the translator becomes an interventionist, and

attacks the existing translations on third world writings translated to atone the colonial taste.

An important postcolonial movement in translation originated from Brazil known

popularly as postcolonial Brazilian theory or cannibalistic theory in translation. The title is

based on the “metaphor of cannibalism” (Munday, 136). Manifesto Antropofago by Oswald

de Andrade in 1920 drew the image of the ritual cannibalization by native Brazilians. This

metaphor was later used, from 1960s to portray the experiences of translation and

colonization and how they ‘devour’ the linguistic and cultural colonialism and colonizer in “a

new purified and energized form” which safeguards the need of native people. Cannibalistic

theory points out to absorbing of the other’s strength and transfers them with the foreign

influence, nourishment along with the native input. The basic idea of the theory is that the

translator shall devour the colonial text metaphorically and along with this, he or she shall

symbolically devour the oppressive colonizer as well. The translations under this theory lack

fidelity because the translators do not give importance to the source text, but digests the

source text and rewrites a new text from the cultural point of view native ones. Here, the

target text or translated text is a creation in its own right even when the influence of source

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text exists, and the target text is “energized and revitalized” in terms of native ideology in the

native tongue.

The Brazilian theory rejects the earlier practice of imitating Europe and

Europeanising the native culture. The native language and culture found a way or a

stronghold to stand against European postcolonial cultural domination by bringing out the

essence of Europe and its culture into native Brazilian terms.

The term ‘cannibalistic translation’ was coined by the Brazilian translator Haroldo de

Campos. Cannibalistic translation creates a new text, which is a complex amalgamation of

two different thought movements, “taking the life energies of the source texts and making it

re-emerge in a nourished revitalized target texts” (Vijayaraghavan, 174). The value of the

original text in translation undergoes change when received in the target culture, and the

theory also shattered the concept of master-servant relation in translation. The master-servant

relationship says that either the translator takes over the source text and ‘improves’ and

‘civilizes’ it or s/he approaches it with humility and acknowledges its greatness through

translation. This concept lost its priority as postcolonial studies emerged in a way new to the

colonial masters where the master himself was made naked by the servants through writings

and translations.

The cannibalistic view of translation is also connected with the notion of

deconstruction proposed by Jacques Derrida, which says that translation process creates an

‘original text’. Derrida considers all translated texts as original texts, thereby identifying and

recognizing the individuality and ideological stability of the translator, the target text and the

target culture. The theory presents an alternative to the years of mental colonialism after the

political colonialism faced by Brazil. The case is the same in all ester colonies or settler

nations, such as India or America or Latin American nations. The theory was a peculiar

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“national experimentalism, a poetics of translation, an ideological operation

and critical discourse theorizing the relation between brazil and external

influences, increasingly moving away from essentialist confrontations towards

a bilateral appropriation of sources and contamination of colonial/hegemonic

univocality” (Basnett and Harish, 95).

When a text or concept is portrayed as the only source to anything else, cannibalistic

theory makes a cut to its core such as to the western concepts, theories or texts and proves

that the East also exist in the academic and conceptual world. Moreover, postcolonial

Brazilian theory strengthens by combining the essence of western theories into itself. An

example would be the phrase, “Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question”. This is a modified

form of Shakespeare’s original dialogue from Hamlet. The phrase includes the situation of

uncertainty in a way in which the natives would understand a just translation or adaptation or

borrowing of a Shakespearian epithet. ‘Tupi’ refers to a tribe accused of cannibalism in

Brazil. When Oswald mentioned this phrase in his Manifesto Antropofago, he brought the

voiceless subaltern or colonized into the realm of the master (Shakespeare), thus initiating a

psychological back translation. The main highlight of the cannibalistic theory is this “duality,

plurality” of origin and cultural identity by juxtaposing the “Europe and the native, the

civilized and barbaric, and the Christian and magic” (Basnet and Harish, 97).

The theory stems from the realization that denial of foreign element will not suffice cultural-

linguistic development or secure identity in the world frame. Even the Europeans are now

stating that a major drawback in their approach to ‘the other’ was their reluctance to accept

the oriental works as texts with materials or textual matter. Instead, they tried to incorporate

such texts into the Western terms by diluting which eventually led to the distortion of the

Eastern concepts or the concepts of the ‘Other’. Postcolonial Brazilian theory is a platform

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for both West and East to incorporate them with the other and strengthening themselves along

with others mainly through the discipline of translation studies.

Linguistic Polarization In India

A land of linguistic varieties like India can rarely unite its linguistic culture and the

only method to bring it together is through translation, thus making linguistic polarization

possible in India. Translation in Indian context deals with multiplicity in everything starting

with language. A translator will have to be aware of culture and influencing cultures, politics

and influencing system of governance, cast and its influencing or promoting factors, race and

its effects, gender and how it is treated by the Indian community and religion and its diverse

forms so as to bring out a “normal” translation in Indian context. Samantaka Das says, “any

kind of theorising about language in Indian context should take into account the multilingual

character of Indian society or India; and the ways in which this multilingualism directly

impinges on the existence of Indians” (Nair, 36). In the case of monolingual or mono-cultural

translation, the focus of the translator will be either on Source Text or Target Text as either

one of them will be powerful enough to exert its superiority over the translator. But in the

case of Indian languages, more languages exercise their influence on the process of

translation.

Let us take Dravidian languages for example. Dravidian language family dates nearly three

thousand years back and is supposedly older than Sanskrit. Tamil, the root language of the

group has derivatives such as Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. When a translation takes

place in these languages, they possess the influence of the root language, although all the

three languages are independent and well established. There is an inter-influence of mother

language on these languages. Apart from this, there is an intra-influencing factor within these

languages according to the various dialectical/regional patterns which might have drastic

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deviations in meaning and culture. A text in question therefore might have a desire for

affiliation with one or more languages, or a desire to shake of the burden of one or more

languages, which makes linguistic polarization through translation a difficult task.The case of

Oriya and Assamese is similar. They have shared “complicated and fraught relationship” (38)

with Bangla. A source text in any of the former languages would either want to get over with

the bond with Bangla or row along with the bond.

The making of every text is dependent of variety of circumstances, including the time period,

politics of the author, form of the text, and so on which might be used in different

combinations to achieve desired effects which might be positive or negative from the point of

view of the aimed community, as in the case of controversial texts such as The Satanic Verses

by Salman Rushdie. Translations of such books create deep problems as they might hinder

the target society or its culture. A translator, thus, has to be extra cautious in finding a way to

“retain, indicate or communicate” these effects in his/her translation without causing a tremor

to the normal pace of life.

But, in a poly-phonic multi-lingual situation, the ‘source language =target language’ or the

‘author-text-receiver = translator-text-receiver’ equations becomes null and theoreticians

need to mould new theories so as to find a way for linguistic polarization in Indian context.

Because when a translator takes up a work, it is not just one target society or culture that he

or she should keep in mind, but a whole lot of linguistic influence exerted from languages of

neighbouring states or even nations in the case of North-East languages where one has to be

aware of the Chinese influence on those languages and their cultures.

In translation, a new type of recording takes place after decoding the SL text. The

decoding and encoding is shaped by linguistic and cultural factors of SL and TL. Exact

equivalence is impossible in translation because the words or phrases in one language might

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not be determinable in another language or the language itself would be of an elusive nature.

Jokes, humorous statements, poetry, drama, fiction, culture and cultural words create

problems in translation. Colloquial expressions, culture-words, slangs, proverbs and so on are

difficult to translate due to lack of one-to-one correspondence between two or more cultures

or languages. For example, the Malayalam word “kurichi” is considered slang in the Malabar

region whereas the same word is a place name in central Travancore. If depiction of the word

would create a misunderstanding for one reading community, how the same would be

rendered in translation, intra-lingual translation in this case.

In the case of Indian languages, the influence of source text pertains because the

linguistic communication in this multi-lingual society is emotional as well. A translator will

have to retain the “sense, semantic compatibility and grammaticality” (Ray, 49) in his/her

translation. Literal translation is not much successful a method in the Indian context because

each cultural element or lexical item will not have a uniform/exactly similar meaning in TL1

or TL2 or TL3 although almost similar meanings or ideas might be there in all languages.

The lack of equivalence will lead to faithless translation. Mohit Ray give out the example of

the famous phrase “Herculean task” as “Bhageerath Prayatna” in Indian sense because a

translation like “Hercules kakarya” (Ray,50) will not be faithful to the source meaning nor

would it render the meaning faithfully/properly to the target audience.

Untranslatability becomes even more complex when it comes to technical and semi-

technical writings. A wrong translation of a word like “toran” as “gateways” would tore off

the real sense of the original term and replaces or assigns it with the semi-correct or incorrect

English translation. Homonyms or same words/phrases used in several Indian languages

create problems for the translators as in the case of word “dharun” which means big in

Bengali whereas it means terrifying, horrific or scary in Malayalam. “Polysemy and

Olygosemy” (Ray,51) hinders a proper translation and a translator should be able to identify

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and differentiate between the denotative, connotative and idiomatic meanings of words so

that the translation would get some “association in languages” (Ray,51), as the undertones of

connotative meanings if not understood properly by the translator will deviate the source text

meaning while in target culture, as in the case of word “jelevi” which cannot be translated as

anything else like pizza in Italian or dessert in English because such a translation deviates the

word and its TL meaning from the real sense.

The central issue with lack of linguistic polarization in Indian context is due to the

multi-grammaticality. Most of the Indian languages follow the subject-object-verb pattern

whereas foreign tongues like English follow the subject-verb-object pattern. Also, the

sentences constructed in Indian languages are in progressive tense whereas English, which is

by far the most commonly used language as a common platform for translation has the option

of using present tense wherever we use progressive tense. When an Indian says that “I have

seen my brother yesterday”, for him it is correct as it is the translation of the progressive

sentence “njan innale ente sahodarane kandirunnu” in Malayalam. But, the English version is

grammatically incorrect. When a foreigner or anyone who is not familiar with the

grammatical pattern of the source language which if happens to be any Indian languages, and

if he attempts for a grammatically sound translation, it is very doubtful whether he would be

able to understand this linguistic difficulty and even if he does understand it, it is doubtful to

which extend he would be able to impart the meaning into the target language without losing

the source text meaning and emotion and without losing the real sense to the target

audience.Textual sense is lost in translation either due to under translation or over translation,

colloquial and conversational language, intonation and accent, figure of speech, unmatched

phonological, syntactic and semantic patterns; and linguistic polarization in the Indian

context will not be possible unless we map a way to mark out equivalency in intra-translation

and inter-translation.

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Interdisciplinary Approach in Translation

Translation is the process of translating words or texts from one language into another

causing a change to the ideas in the source language, its culture and linguistic element,

through methods of conversion, transformation, alteration, adaptation, transmutation,

rendering and so on to befit the same into a recognizable target culture and language.

The act of translation has originated from the pre historic times onwards when

primitive man/woman tried to communicate with man or woman of his/her time by imparting

mental ideas of food, fear or shelter to the nearby natural images or objects such as a prey or

a bush or a tree top. Later, men started to imitate the sounds and grunts of other life forms to

refer to objects. The onomatopoeic words that linguists talk about can be viewed as the

primary evidences of practical application of translation, although the term developed as a

study in a far later age. The value of the genre is inevitably evident in the pages of history

mainly in the translation of the Bible, a work done worldwide making use of the possibility of

metaphrase or word-to-word translation and paraphrase or sense-for-sense translation. The

earliest available comments of translation as a discipline were made by the Roman

academicians of second century, Cicero and Horace.

Role of translation widened as merchant ships sailed out in different directions,

rowing over the tides of cultures and languages to such an extent that primary translation

becomes unavoidable for primary or basic communication. They spread the differences in

language and culture all over the globe in such a way that one or the other nation and their

people had either the urge or need to learn another language and thereby another culture so as

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to maintain a cordial merchant relationship for profit. Nations sought the help of

academicians who after gaining knowledge of the foreign language translates it into the target

language for the target reader. The primary source of foreign cultural knowledge was

obviously the foreign literature and nations translated the literature of other nations to

understand and identify the people, customs, traditions, practices of such foreign nations.

Down the ages, translation remains the only tool connecting almost all the disciplines

or discourses present in the current world. Linguists were of the opinion that it is language

which connects the world but the fact remains that without translation languages would

remain unattainable entities. It is only through translation that the world would be able to

communicate about the socially and scientifically subjective society.

Most of the scholars in the field of cultural studies like Susan Bassnet and Andre

Lefevere see translation in the broad context of cultural study (Wang Ning 7), whereas the

cultural studies is seen as a loom connecting ethnic studies, gender studies, area studies,

media studies and so on, and are of the opinion that “cross-cultural and intercultural studies

cannot take place without translation” (Ning7).

Fast developments in the social sphere brought imminent shifts to the process of

communication. Technological developments brought sweeping changes to the realm of

translation, at first through the machine translation of 1940s and then through the CAT

(Computer Assisted Translation) software, which include translation oriented terminology,

database management systems, multi-lingual text processing systems and so on (Budin 247).

The modern economic, industrial, cultural and scientific development has led to the need of

translation as a bridge to resolve language barriers in international research projects (Budin

248).

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Translation studies branched out from its Eurocentric inheritance as a result of the

development of post-colonial discourse (Sujatha 172). During the colonial times, European

colonizers translated native texts into his language but interpreted the native culture and its

details from the Eurocentric point of view. As the post-structural branch of translation

bloomed under the ideology of Jacques Derrida that translation process creates an original

text, and as the post-colonial critics like Homi Bhaba, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said et al

reconstructed the translation through deconstruction, the roles and values attributed to the

native languages and cultures by colonial masters were shattered. They made us of the

colonial language as their tool to prick and then to stab at the European arrogance.

The recent developments in translation theory consider literature as a social institution

and related to other social institutions and therefore, translation studies analyze a text from its

linguistic, semiotic, historical, economical, psychoanalytical and anthropological

perspectives.

The basic units of world system of translation are language group, rather than nation

states and their aim is to analyze the structure of translation flows between the various

language groups (Heilborn 304).

“Sociologically, translations can be studied from various angles by which

questions can be raised about the way in which cultural goods circulate outside

their context of production, unravel the relationship between different

countries and cultures, study the role of intermediary centers, decipher the

complexities of cross-cultural understanding and analyze the evolution of the

system of transnational communication” (Heilborn, 307).

Translation has been the most basic mechanism in the production and circulation of

new genres, devices and motifs across modern literary cultures which make up literary poly-

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systems in a wider context. Andre Lefevere says that dialogical chains of relationships are

constructed between source text and target text and their respective social, historical and

literary contexts (Selim 323). Lawrence Venuti calls the political nature of translation as

scandalous, because translation while upholding hegemonic cultural and institutional

structure, individual translation has the power to disrupt and challenge these selfsame

structures (Selim 324).

The interdisciplinary approach in translation studies becomes important on

considering the fact that the genre holds the key to the production and destruction of

meaningfulness and meaninglessness in any linguistic culture and cultural language. Jeremy

Munday in his book Translation Studies points out translation as unfixed in its relationship

with other disciplines. He says that the genre functions at the expense of existing field of

subjects where “each subject competes to get the superior position which leads to the non-

conformity of stable inter-disciplinary relationship” (190).

The growth of new technologies determines new area of study in translation or a re-

examination of established areas. Munday says that cross-disciplinary research methods are

being used in translation from a cultural perspective, where one analyzes post-colonial from a

post-structuralist perspective and another brings in post-structuralism, literary theory,

criticism, historiography, philosophy and French discourse analysis. (187)

To conclude, translation studies make use of technique and concepts from a range of

backgrounds or disciplines but it has not yet gained a full-fledged status of inter-disciplinary

methodology because only a few researchers and researches possess the necessary expertise

in a wide range of subject areas.

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Inter-disciplinary approach in translation is possible only with a successful knowledge

of Source language and culture and target language and culture, because failure in producing

a tiny cultural nuance from one language to another causes deviation of textual meaning in a

wider context. Within the genre and outside the genre, a translator should have both

theoretical and applied knowledge so as to meet with the needs of the task at hand.

In the realm of linguistics and comparative literature, translation is the basic tool the

technicians need to perform their research, which, as Susan Bassnet, Andre Lefevere, Jeremy

Munday, Lawrence Venuti and so on says, confines translation for the time being as one

under cultural studies. The shift in translation from inter-textual to intra-textual in third world

countries in the twenty-first century must be followed by studies on social sections like

women, transgender, Dalit etc. and how they mold their identities and cultural self-

consciousness in language/languages. An inter-disciplinary approach in translation is still

based on the linguistic, cultural or comparative ideologies in international level which ought

to come down or rather shift it’s euro-centric/ Latin American attention to the Indo-African

nations and their linguistic and cultural identities.

As the polysystem theorists put, translation is viewed in line with other backgrounds

but the age demands a deeper excavation of or on these backgrounds so as to navigate the

genre further for the development and sake of knowledge of nations and their citizens.

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Works Cited

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