Translator’s ideology: the accented critique of the Church and the missing feminist authorial voice in the translation of Sara Joseph’s Othappu

ABSTRACT

Exploring the interactions of female sexuality and spirituality from a feminist lens, Othappu by Sara Joseph, is influential in the genre of women’s writing in Malayalam. Through a textual analysis of the novel’s prize-winning translation by Rev. Valson Thampu, the paper examines how the author’s voicing of female resistance to patriarchal institutions gets effaced in the translation process. The translation appears to be stripped of its explicitly feminist authorial voice, where the specific articulations of female subjectivity get replaced by a universally-appealing critical voice, accenting the translator’s ideology. Contrary to Joseph’s emphasis on the text’s engagement with a woman’s response to religion, Thampu voices his reading of the text as an “individual’s” conflict with faith. The attempt is to locate the discursive presence of the translator and how the translator’s ideological leanings influence the transference of the feminist politics of the source text. Apart from closely comparing the original text to the translation in terms of the specificities of the language and analysis of the paratextual elements, a macro-dimension approach which locates the social context and ideological premise examining the translator’s role as creator of a new social narrative through translation is also employed.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation
• women’s writing
• ideology
• Malayalam novel

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The Church that is addressed in Othappu is the institutional order of Syrian Christians of Kerala. Syrian Christians claim to be that their origin can be traced back to the proselytization mission of St. Thomas Apostle who came to India in 52 A.D. Though a much debated theory, the claim holds that the earliest convertees of St. Thomas were a group of Brahmin families. Socially and economically a privileged community, Syrian Christian community is recognized as an upper caste. According to Susan Bayly’s book, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, Syrian Christians were assimilated into the savarna caste hierarchy within Kerala. A critique of the “superior” status Syrian Christians assume to distinguish from the other, “lower” class Christians and their casteist practices, is a recurring theme in Joseph’s works.

2. Translation mine.

3. Translation mine.

4. The use of “betrayal” here does not imply nor support the arguments for equivalency in translation. It is used to indicate choices made by the translator that betray the politics of the original text.

5. Emphasis mine.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chythan Ann George

Chythan Ann George is a research scholar at the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies, University of Hyderabad. Her research interests include gender studies, women writing, comparative literature and translation studies. Her doctoral research is on the Malayalam novels by women and their translations.