Mad Woman in the Attic

Literature has always been indebted to translation throughout history; most of the classics have had to be translated from their original language into major European languages. A brief history of the evolution of the translation studies and its theories helps to widen the scope of linguistic studies and exert tremendous influences. The Romans translated the well-known Greek classics, with Cicero and Horace as the first theorists. The Romans permitted the use of new words in translations, because they too aimed at enriching their own literary tradition. They did made a significant distinction between ‘word for word’ translation and ‘sense for sense’ translation. The Bible was translated into vernacular languages in Europe in the sixteenth century. The translators of Bible aimed at both intelligibility and a gratifying style. The renaissance style was that of creative appropriation. Wyatt’s translations of Petrarch’s sonnets have an immediate impact on the readers with a very con...

Communication of meaning: The first ever view is that translation is the communication of meaning from one language to another. Quoting Dr. Johnson, “ to translate is to change into another language, retaining the sense”. In the study of meaning word is often considered as the symbol or the sign. So Leonard Forster considers translation as the transference of symbols and signs of source language to target language. But words are not independent entities, they have associations and connotations. From among the many possible symbols, the translator will have to choose an appropriate symbol for encoding the meaning. The semiotic and the symbolic views only suggest the complexities of meaning in translation. Process and product: We tend to look at the translation as the product rather than the process. The theory of translation in last century was mostly ‘product oriented’; it was only the end product that was the essential, not the process. A very naïve way to look at the translated ...

Translation is a kind of activity which inevitably involves at least two languages and two cultural traditions." (Toury 1978). As this statement implies, translators are permanently faced with the problem of how to treat the cultural aspects implicit in a source text (ST) and of finding the most appropriate technique of successfully conveying these aspects in the target language (TL). These problems may vary in scope depending on the cultural and linguistic gap between the two (or more) languages concerned (Nida 1964). Translation studies-relating both to questions of theory and practice-represent a growing body of work which, in recent times, has received insightful inputs from scholars working within different disciplines- linguistics, semiotics, culture studies, literary theory, psychology, etc. this confluence and convergence on translation has not only elevated it form a second rate activity to a ‘high pedestal’ of a discipline, but also brought into sharp focus the ‘tra...