Introduction

We have already seen that we cannot claim to have an indigenous translation theory, although translation as a practice was not unheard of. We have also noted how it was quite common for the people to switch from one dialect to the other or from one language to the other, in the course of everyday speech or literary texts. The epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata were reproduced in other Indian languages. It has to be remembered that this was largely an oral tradition, and translation meant transcreation rather than faithful rendering of meanings. In fact, ‘transcreation' is the term that P. Lal, who was a translator of the Indian epics, likes to use for his translations. Sherry Simon and Paul St-Pierre in the introduction to their book Changing the Terms make a distinction between the western tradition of translation and the Indian tradition. They maintain that the Indian tradition “is essentially oral, involves a much looser notion of the text, interacts intensely with local forms of narrative and is a revigorating and positive global influence” (10). They draw upon a speech by Amitav Ghosh who points out how the Panchatantra passed into Arabic through a Persian translation, giving birth to The Thousand and One Nights . This in turn passed on to the Slavic languages through Greek, from Hebrew into Latin and from there to German and Italian. Thus they have had countless metamorphoses, the main ones being the fables of La Fontaine and the tales of the Grimm brothers. This was more or less how translation worked in the Indian tradition. A story that was out in the public domain could be chosen and worked upon to produce something that was not quite the original. That is why translation is called a transcreation rather than anything else.

India does not have an organized body of translation theory or what we can call translation theorists, but there are a few people who have written extensively on the subject. Let us look at a few of them.