Indian Writing In English: Some Language Issues and Translation Problems
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ABSTRACT:
Revised and updated text of a paper given by the author at Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) on 8 March 2006, as part of the event "Writers' Meet".
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We may define Indian Writing in English as original creative writing produced in English by Indian writers or writers of Indian origin, resident or expatriate, for whom English will normally be a second language but who have in all probability been educated, even within India, in English-medium schools and universities, and are likely to write English more fluently than any native Indian language. This very particular set of conditions, inherited from the Raj but carried on beyond Independence to the present day, in no way makes these writers any less Indian: in most cases they are representing the lives, conversations and thoughts of Indian characters who more often than not are presumed to be speaking and thinking not in English at all, but in a plurality of Indian languages. Recent analyses have taken the view that IWE is already a case of translated literature, in the sense that it is already the product of a transfer between, schematically, two cultural systems or polysystems, even before anyone translates the text into a third language.
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I shall examine one extract each from four different IWE novels, with a view to identifying some of the persistent language problems associated with Indian English that are liable to produce translation difficulties. For present purposes I shall not have any particular target language in mind; I shall, however, be assuming a European/Western language, while of course being fully aware that IWE works are also, and indeed frequently, translated into Indian languages. I have chosen four novels, two by men and two by women and three of them by living authors, which are set entirely in India, and whose characters are entirely or mostly Indian. They are: The Painter of Signs (1967) by the late R.K. Narayan; In Custody (1984) by Anita Desai; Ladies Coupé (1999) by Anita Nair; and The Hungry Tide (2004) by Amitav Ghosh. In each case I shall, while briefly explaining the plot, confine my analysis to the opening sequence of the book. It is obviously not my purpose in the present context to offer a literary-critical analysis of the novels concerned , and the analyses suggested will therefore be essentially linguistic in nature, stressing the lexical, sociolinguistic and sociocultural aspects, and with a specific orientation towards translation.
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