Hegemony and Power

Both the translator and the postcolonial writer face the vexing problem of having to translate culture-specific terms like food, festivals etc. The choice is to leave the terms untranslated, or give a glossary or footnote. Writers sometimes tend to incorporate the explanation as unobtrusively as they can in the text itself. For instance, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things ends with a Malayalam word “Naaley”, which, if left untranslated, would be lost on the non-Malayali reader. So she immediately adds its translation, ‘tomorrow', after it. The same can be part of translation strategy also. Tymoczko points out how “translators moving from a dominant-culture source text to a minority-culture audience often leave dominant cultural materials implicit, presupposing knowledge of the mythic allusions, historical events or customs of the dominant culture: such a stance is part of the assertion of hegemony” (28). For instance, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories have a lot of culture specific terms that are difficult for a non-British reader to appreciate or understand. But Doyle never felt the need to address the problems that such a reader might face. However, an Arundhati Roy writing about a Kathakali performance in Kerala, feels obliged to devote an entire chapter for the benefit of the uninitiated reader. Similarly, Indian language translations of great authors like Tolstoy or Victor Hugo do not usually have glosses for culture specific terms. The implicit understanding is that the reader would or should know them. This power equation, in which one language panders to the tastes of the dominant language, is indicative of the unequal relationship between them. It is not surprising that postcolonial or minority literatures, and translations from minority literatures into languages like English, have these rather apologetic interventions. Tymoczko observes that the more confident a writer becomes, the less obliged s/he feels to give these glosses. The example she cites is that of Ngugi wa Thiongo who shifted from English to Gikuyu. By the time he came to write his last English novel Ngugi completely abandoned English translations of Gikuyu words or phrases that he used. After all, if you could have French and German phrases in an English text, why not Gikuyu?