The Misery and the Splendour of Translation: Kabir Chowdhury’s English Translation of Bangla Novels

Abstract

This qualitative study explores the correspondence of the clues of translation miseries and splendours given by José Ortega y Gasset in his philosophical theory of translation advocated in 1937 in the essay “The Misery and the Splendor of Translation.” After matching with modern translation terminology and metalanguages, the clues are set as rubric to identify the instances of translation miseries and splendours in Kabir Chowdhury’s English translation of Bangla novels. Five of such novels are purposively selected as samples. Textual analysis method is applied to compare the sample novels with their source texts and to bring out the instances where the translation is – in Ortega’s opinion – miserable or splendid. The findings related to the correspondence of Ortega’s clues and their application on Chowdhury’s translation are presented in three separate chapters. It is identified that Ortega’s clues of translation miseries are the translator’s presentation of the original author in usual expressions, and the obstacles created by the internal form of any language. The clues of translation splendours, on the other hand, are identified as the translator’s acts of capturing the silence that exists in the ST, their transportation of exotic source text aspects to the target text, and their recourse to ugly translation for making some source text aspects clear. Ortega’s first clue of translation misery corresponds to the modern concepts of stylistic loss and semantic loss and the second one corresponds to the concepts of cultural and linguistic untranslatability. His clues of splendour, on the other hand, correspond to the issues of expansion, foreignisation and thick translation respectively.------