Translanguaging in Translation: A Case Study of an English Translation of a Hindi Novel “Godaan”

Abstract

This paper brings together the field of sociolinguistics and the field of translation studies and examines translated texts through the concept of translanguaging. Although occurrences of linguistic features of the source language (SL) are not normally expected in translated texts, translators occasionally push and flout language boundaries for many communicative purposes such as to convey culture-specific pragmatic nuances, to create a new concept in the receiving culture, to implicitly voice their socio-political ideologies, to preserve rhetorical effectiveness, to experiment with new styles and so on. Such a risk-taking, but strategic language use taken right at a linguistic border by translators is doubtlessly translanguaging, and their translanguaging practices have been contributing to the evolution of languages and to the transformation of societies. The current paper examines one of the English translations of Godaan, Premchand's masterpiece novel written in Hindi and published in 1936. The translation of Godaanby Anurag Yadav published in 2009 has numerous Hindi words scattered around within the English text without glossaries or footnotes. This research examines these Hindi words as well as the socio-cultural, socio-historical and socio-political backgrounds of the novel in order to explore the mechanism and implication of translanguaging in translation.