Nanhī Jal Parī: A Hermeneutic Reading of Urdu Translations of “The Little Mermaid”

Abstract

The article studies Urdu translations of Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale “The Little Mermaid” with the help of Lawrence Venuti’s hermeneutic model, which conceives of translation not in terms of fidelity to a source text, but as an interpretive act in which a translator uses interpretants to transform a source text according to the receiving culture’s preferences. While every translation domesticates a source text, for Venuti, a translation can produce either a domesticating or a foreignizing effect depending on the linguistic resources from which a translator draws their interpretants. For clarity, I propose to replace the terms “domesticating effect” and “foreignizing effect” with “conforming effect” and “non-conforming effect” respectively. I argue that Urdu translators draw their interpretants from dominant linguistic and cultural resources as a result of which these translations produce conforming effects, maintaining the status quo and reinforcing the linguistic and cultural standards in Urdu.