Foreignizing And Domesticating Strategies In Translations Of Saadat Hassan Manto’s Thanda Gosht By Khalid Hassan And Alok Bhalla

Abstract

This paper analyzes English translations of Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story Thanda Gosht by Khalid Hasan, a Pakistani journalist and renowned translator of Manto’s works, juxtaposed with translation of the same work by Alok Bhalla, also a well-known Indian author and translator. Through this analysis, the research examines the Source Text (SL), and compare it with both of Target Language (TL) translations. Primarily, the paper probes into how far ‘sense-for-sense transmission’ from SL to the TL occurs in these translations, along with the lexical choices that the aforementioned translators make in order to deliver the essential socio-political meaning that dwells in Manto’s satiric writings. In doing so, this study investigates the accuracy of the intended satiric transmission towards TL audience in carrying almost equivalent satiric emotions. As both translators belong to countries, differing widely in their ideological narratives; therefore, the element of ‘national ideology’ holds, as characters in the short story belong to different religious and social cliques. Hence this paper attempts to illustrate the ‘translation strategies’ (i.e., foreignizing and domesticating), ‘religious’ and ‘cultural’ prejudices, as well as ‘equivalence’ ratio, of both these translated TL texts in the light of SL text. For this comparative analysis, my theoretical framework will incorporate translation stipulations from Mona Baker’s Routledge Encyclopedia for Translation Studies (2005) namely: ‘Equivalnce’; ‘Ideology and Translation’; ‘Strategies of Translation’; as well as Susan Bassnett’s Translation Studies (2005). The analysis will show how close each translator comes to the SL culture, keeping in view of Manto’s judiciously chosen lexical terms, and their cultural significance in the Indo-Pak pre- and post- independence subcontinent.