Translating Eloped Women: A Critical Analysis of the Selected English Translations of Urdu Novel Aangan by Mastoor

ABSTRACT

A woman who is denied a choice of man and elopes is not accepted in the patriarchal culture of the subcontinent. This image of eloped woman is rarely investigated in the translated texts. The present study focuses on investigating the reconstruction of the feminist identity of the eloped women and analyzing the reflection of the perspectival positions of the female translators in the selected translated texts. The sample comprises an Urdu novel, Aangan, with its two English translations by Rockwell and Hussain. After preparing the parallel corpora, the toolkit of NLTK is applied to extract the selected terms’ concordances. The data is analysed through critical discourse analysis with a focus on the theoretical assumptions of feminist translation. It is found that the perspectival positions of both of the translators reflect their lexico-grammatical choices. Hussain translates the image with more sensitivity by employing the discursive strategies of intensification, nominalization, over lexicalization, argumentation, and generalization; and translation strategies of explicitness, addition, emphasis change, and literal translation. However, Rockwell mostly maintains and slightly magnifies the feminist identity of shameless women. Overall, she employs the translation strategies of literal translation, sense for sense, and emphasis change.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical discourse analysis
• feminist identity
• fiction
• gender
• ideology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Isra Irshad

Isra Irshad, PhD scholar (University of Gujrat) is working as a lecturer at University of Gujrat. Her research interests include Feminism, translation, Corpus Analysis, and Discourse Analysis.

Musarat Yasmin

Musarat Yasmin earned her MA in Applied Linguistics from University of Reading, UK. She availed a pre-doc scholarship for San Jose State University, USA and completed her PhD. Since 2014, she has been working as an Assistant Professor in University of Gujrat, Pakistan. She has authored more than 25 peer-reviewed international journal papers with an h-index 11. Her research interests include ESP, TESOL, Education and technology and Discourse Analysis. She serves as co-editor for Hayatian Journal of Linguistics and Literature and as reviewer Taylor and Francis, Springer, Elsevier, IEEE, Wiley and De Gruyter journals.