Literary Translation


If languages are systems of knowledge, then creative writing in those languages carries worldviews and ways of being and seeing that are specific to those languages, communities, and regions. The craft of literary translation makes it possible for us to access creative writing in the form of novels, short stories, poetry, plays, essays, (auto)biographies, and travel accounts written in different languages, bringing the world closer to us. Literary translation—both between Indian languages as well as from Indian languages into English—is flourishing in the Indian market as well as the global market for Indian literatures today. At the same time, the theory and philosophy of translation has established a firm place in many Indian higher education institutions under the category of Translation Studies.

Among the important questions that translation poses is how different linguistic communities make sense of the world and communicate that information within and beyond. What, then, are the linguistic, literary, social, political, and historical nuances of translating from one language into another? How does the translator successfully translate a way of looking at the world into another language? Do we translate the reader into the world of the text or the text into the world of the reader?

Furthermore, within the hegemony of English, it becomes important to ask what role English translations play in making literatures written in other languages visible or invisible. What do we gain or lose when we translate texts written in Indian languages into English, or vice-versa?

In addition to these questions, creative writing has also thrown up specific challenges for Machine Translation. Some of the questions we are interested in answering include the question of ambiguity or complexity in literary texts, both of which are highly prized in creative writing but pose a specific challenge to MT engines. How do we teach MT models to read between the lines or to understand that which is indirect, oblique, or absent-present in a literary text?

Translation themes and projects that are of interest to faculty in the Human Sciences Research Centre and where we seek to answer such questions include:

  1. The practice and theory of literary translation from Indian languages into English
  2. Problems and Issues in Machine Translation dealing with literary corpora from Indian languages

Faculty Involved: Nazia Akhtar