Rewriting Taste in Translation: The Cultural Politics of Tercüme’s Anglophone Poetry

Vernacular Modernism and the Colonial Tongue: Narrative Strategies, Language, and Decoloniality in O.V. Vijayan and R.K. Narayan

This article does a comparative study of the narrative strategies of O.V.Vijayan (1930-2005) and R.K.Narayan (1906-2001), two towering figures in Indian Literature who worked in fundamentally different linguistic registers and with divergent aesthetic and political commitments. Vijayan, writing primarily in Malayalam, is positioned here as a practitioner of vernacular modernism whose linguistic experimentation with dialect, myth, and indigenous oral forms constitutes a form of decolonial praxis. His self-translations into English, rather than smoothing the rough edges of the vernacular, are read as acts of rewriting that negotiate the politics of translation and postcolonial representation. R.K. Narayan, by contrast, operated exclusively within the English literary tradition, adopting what might be termed a domesticated realism shaped in part by his relationship with Western publishing and mentorship. This paper argues that while Narayan’s Malgudi fiction performs a subtle resistance to colonial epistemologies through irony and humor, his narrative form remains embedded in Eurocentric realist convention that limits the scope of his decolonial critique. The paper subjects that claim to rigorous factchecking, nuancing the comparison where necessary, and situates both writers within the broader frameworks of postcolonial theory, Global South literary studies, and the politics of literary language. 

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

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.

Translation, Meaning, and Revolutionary Voice: A Critical Study of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Poetry in Urdu and English

The paper explores the intricate process of translating the revolutionary Urdu poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz into English, and how linguistic change influences the meaning, emotion and politics of the poetry. This paper examines the conflict of fidelity and interpretation that is a part of poetic translation by closely reading four classic poems: “Mujhse Pehli Si Mohabbat, Subh-e-Azadi, Hum Dekhenge, and Bol Ke Lab Azad Hain Tere. Based on the theories of translation of Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson, and Eugene Nida, the analysis shows that English translations can be successful in transferring the political vision and thematic issues of Faiz, but frequently lose the musicality, the metaphorical richness, and the cultural depth of the Urdu originals. The paper will claim that there is neither a direct transference nor total betrayal in translation of the work of Faiz, but a creative re-enactment that opens up new interpretive possibilities and unavoidably alters the affective and aesthetic aspects of the original. This change especially affects the revolutionary voice that determines the poetry of Faiz as the transfer of the tradition of the ghazal in Urdu to the English verse changes the thin line between the lyricism of romanticism and the criticism of politics, which is the distinctive feature of the poetic success of Faiz.

IN G

Speechlessness, objectification, and stasis: the construction of footbinding terminology in Chinese–English dictionaries, 1815–2021

This article examines the gendered politics embedded in Chinese–English lexicographical translations of footbinding terminology from the nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on feminist translation studies and critical lexicography, the study demonstrates that dictionaries function as culturally determining discourses rather than neutral linguistic repositories. Through a diachronic analysis, the research identifies three discursive mechanisms: structural silence, aestheticized objectification, and static reconfiguration. Early missionary lexicography displayed a systematic absence of footbinding terminology produced by gendered spatial segregation and a reliance on elite Confucian linguistic standards. From the late nineteenth century, the introduction of terms such as “golden lilies” leveraged the dictionary’s scientific authority to recontextualize bodily suffering into romanticized symbols for the Orientalist gaze. In modern dictionaries, the shift to seemingly neutral renderings like “bound feet” further attenuates violence through the nominalization of dynamic coercion into a static condition, thereby erasing agency and lived pain. The study concludes that the transition from aestheticization to scientific neutrality masks a persistent patriarchal discourse within the lexicographical record. It calls for a feminist lexicographical ethics that exposes the unilateral perspectives hidden behind the veneer of neutrality, restoring corporeal reality to women’s experiences in cross-cultural knowledge production.

Translation Strategies in the Lithuanian Translation of the Polish Sociolect in Lithuania: The Case of Bartosz Połoński’s Novel Robczik

The translation of non-standard speech (dialects, sociolects) poses a significant challenge for translators, as it requires unconventional translation solutions to achieve both stylistic and pragmatic equivalence. This article analyzes the Lithuanian translation of Bartosz Połoński’s novel Rob­czik. Powieść wileńska, in which, the author employs sociolectal stylization – the characters use slang common among Polish-background youth in Vilnius at the turn of the 20th and 21th centuries. On the linguistic level, the author introduces two types of stylistic elements: (1) Northern Borderlands Polish features across all levels of language, and (2) lexical borrowings from Russian, Lithuanian, and English. Each of these elements required a different translation strategy in the target text. The analysis employed four theoretical categories: full substitution, ‘shifted’ substitution, neutralization, and additional stylization. Since the sociolect of the period depicted in Lithuania was largely based on Russian and English loanwords, translational equivalence was achieved through their substitution. In the case of dialectal expressions lacking precise equivalents, a compensatory strategy was applied by replacing them with colloquialisms. The Lithuanian lexical elements deliberately introduced in the source text were neutralized. At the same time, the translation introduced an additional layer of stylization by incorporating selected Polish linguistic features with the aim of conveying the authentic social identity of the novel’s characters.