Title: Arundhati Roy in Thai : compromising the linguistic hybridity in translation
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2023, vol. 49, iss. 1, pp. 55-75
Extent
55-75
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2023-1-3
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/digilib.78898
Type: Article
Language
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Rights access
open access
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
The article examines the Thai translations of Arundhati Roy's novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which feature linguistic hybridity that addresses the complex, intermingling realities of the former colonized space. Using Klinger's (2015) concepts of symbolic and iconic hybridity to explain the motivation behind the use of non-standard language in Roy's postcolonial novels and their Thai translations, this article argues that the Thai versions fell short of retaining a reasonable degree of linguistic hybridity because the translator chose a compromising method of making Roy's novels more understandable to Thai readers. By compromising, the translator used a specific method of transliterating Pali-Sanskrit etymological terms, a cushioning strategy, and footnotes. The translations appear to contradict the author's viewpoint on the dynamics of core and periphery languages. Multicultural expressions that are meant to symbolically represent different levels of power in the real world are ignored, thereby failing to convey Roy's intention of defying former colonial monolingual practice and breaking free from such a legacy.
References
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[40] Sejpal, Avni (2019) The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is written in English but imagined in many languages- Interview Arundhati Roy. Eastern Times. Accessed on September 15, 2023. https://www.easterntimes.pk/en/the-ministry-of-utmost-happiness-is-written-inenglish-but-imagined-in-many-languages-interview-arundhati-roy/
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[2] Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2012[1993]) Thick translation. In: Venuti, Lawrence (ed.) The Translation Studies Readers. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 331–343.
[3] Aroonmanakun, Wirote (2000) Zero pronoun resolution in Thai: A centering approach. In: Burnham, Denis, Sudaporn Luksaneeyanawin, Christ Davis and Lafourcade, Mathieu (ed.) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language Processing. Chulalongkorn University Printing House, 127–146.
[4] Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (2002) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
[5] Baker, Mona (2004) The treatment of variation in corpus-based translation studies. Language Matters 35 (1), 28–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/10228190408566202
[6] Bandia, Paul F. (2014) Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa. London: Routledge. (Original work published in 2008)
[7] Bassnett, Susan (2014) Postcolonial translation. In Chew, Shirley and David Richards (ed.) A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 79–95.
[8] Bertacco, Simona (2013) The 'gift' of translation to postcolonial literatures. In: Bertacco, Simona (ed.) Language and Translation in Postcolonial Literatures: Multilingual Contexts, Translational Texts. London: Routledge, 136–167.
[9] Berezowski, Leszek (1997) Dialect in Translation. Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego.
[10] Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
[11] Boehmer, Elleke (2009) Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
[12] Chandran, Mimi (2014) Writer-Translators of Ethnicity Translations and literatures written in English. European Journal of English Studies 18 (3), 263–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2014.944019
[13] Chittiphalangsri, Phrae (2014) On the virtuality of translation in Orientalism. Translation Studies 7 (1), 50–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2013.843356
[14] Cronin, Michael (2003) Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge.
[15] Dibavar, Sara Saei, Pyeaam Abbasi, and Hossein Pirnajmuddin (2022) JM Coetzee's Foe: A narrative of dislocation through assimilation. Brno Studies in English 48 (1), 201–218. https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2022-1-12
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[17] Fowler, Roger (1989[1977]) Linguistics and the Novel. London: Routledge.
[18] Gardner-Chloros, Penelope and Daniel Weston (2015) Code-switching and multilingualism in literature. Language and Literature 24 (3), 182–193. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947015585065
[19] Harrison, Rachel V. and Peter A. Jackson (eds.) (2010) The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand. New York: Cornell University Press.
[20] Herzfeld, Michael (2017) Thailand in a larger universe: The lingering consequences of crypto-colonialism. The Journal of Asian Studies 76 (4), 887–906. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911817000894
[21] Hunsu, Folasade (2014) Autobiography and the fictionalization of Africa in the twenty-first century: Abdul Razak Gurnah's art in Desertion. Brno Studies in English 40 (2), 77–89. https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2014-2-5
[22] Klinger, Susanne (2015) Translation and Linguistic Hybridity: Constructing World-View. London: Routledge
[23] Knepper, Wendy (2006) Colonization, creolization, and globalization: The art and ruses of bricolage. Small Axe 10 (3), 70–86.
[24] Määttä, Simo K. (2004) Dialect and point of view: The ideology of translation in The Sound and the Fury in French. Target 16 (2), 319–339. https://doi.org/10.1075/target.16.2.06maa
[25] Menozzi, Filippo (2019) "Too much blood for good literature": Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and the question of realism. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55 (1), 20–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2018.1507919
[26] Neumann, Birgit (2021) An ocean of languages? Multilingualism in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. https://doi.org/10.1177/00219894211007916
[27] Niranjana, Tejaswini (1992) Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
[28] Pinto, Sara Ramos (2009) How important is the way you say it? A discussion on the translation of linguistic varieties. Target 21 (2), 289–307. https://doi.org/10.1075/target.21.2.04pin
[29] Phanthaphoommee, Narongdej (2015) Kan plae phawa phan phasom nai nawaniyai rueang the Moor's Last Sigh kho̜ng Sulman Rushdie [A translation of hybridity in The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie] (Unpublished master's dissertation, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand).
[30] Phanthaphoommee, Narongdej (2022) Translation of pronouns and deictic positioning in the Thai prime minister's weekly addresses. KEMANUSIAAN: The Asian Journal of Humanities 29 (2), 27–47. https://doi.org/10.21315/kajh2022.29.2.2
[31] Rafael, Vicente L. (2016) Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
[32] Reyes Torres, Agustín (2011) Roy's Inglish in The God of Small Things: A language for subversion, reconciliation and reassertion. Odisea 12, 195–204.
[33] Rosa, Alexandra Assis. (2012) Translating place: Linguistic variation in translation. Word and Text 2 (2), 75–97.
[34] Ross, Michael Lawrence (2019) Arundhati Roy and the politics of language. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989419881033
[35] Roy, Arundhati (1997) The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo.
[36] Roy, Arundhati (2007) Thepphachao haeng sing lek-lek [The God of Small Things]. Translated by Sotsai. Bangkok: Foundation for Children Publishing.
[37] Roy, Arundhati (2017) The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. London: Penguin Books.
[38] Roy, Arundhati (2018) What is the morally appropriate language in which to think and write? Arundhati Roy on the complex, shifting politics of language and translation in India. Literary Hub. Accessed on December 22, 2021. https://lithub.com/what-is-themorally-appropriate-language-in-which-to-think-and-write
[39] Roy, Arundhati (2020) Krasuang Suk Sud-Sud [The Ministry of Utmost Happiness]. Translated by Sotsai. Bangkok: Matichon.
[40] Sejpal, Avni (2019) The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is written in English but imagined in many languages- Interview Arundhati Roy. Eastern Times. Accessed on September 15, 2023. https://www.easterntimes.pk/en/the-ministry-of-utmost-happiness-is-written-inenglish-but-imagined-in-many-languages-interview-arundhati-roy/
[41] Semino, Elena (2002) A cognitive stylistic approach to mind style in narrative fiction. In: Semino, Elena and Jonathan Culpeper (eds.) Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 95–122.
[42] Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2012[1992]) The politics of translation. In: Venuti, Lawrence (ed.) The Translation Studies Readers. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 312–330.
[43] Sternberg, Meir (1981) Polylingualism as reality and translation as mimesis. Poetics Today 2 (4), 221–239.
[44] Szymańska, Izabela (2017) The treatment of geographical dialect in literary translation from the perspective of relevance theory. Research in Language 15 (1), 61–77. https://doi.org/10.1515/rela-2017-0004
[45] Techawongstien, Koraya and Narongdej Phanthaphoommee (2022) Unintentional containment of the contaminated: The role of translation and interpreting during the COVID-19 crisis in Thailand. The Journal of Internationalization and Localization 9 (2), 180–205. https://doi.org/10.1075/jial.00026.tec
[46] Techawongstien, Koraya and Phrae Chittiphalangsri (2023) One Thai: The politics of singularity in the Thai landscape of translation. In: Chittiphalangsri, Phrae and Vicente L. Rafael (eds.) Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos: The Landscape of Translation in Southeast Asia. London: Routledge.
[47] Tickell, Alex (2003) The God of Small Things: Arundhati Roy's postcolonial cosmopolitanism. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38 (1), 73–89.
[48] Tymoczko, Maria (1999) Post-colonial writing and literary translation. In: Bassnett, Susan and Harish Trivedi (ed.) Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 19–40.
[49] Venuti, Lawrence (1995) The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge.
[50] Weston, Daniel and Penelope Gardner-Chloros (2015) Mind the gap: What code-switching in literature can teach us about code-switching. Language and Literature 24 (3), 194–212. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947015585066