Readership

One of the main questions that the English translations for Indian works have to face is the question of readership. This is a strange situation from the translator's point of view – consider the case of a translator who translates from Hindi to English for an Indian publishing house. If her readers are Hindi speakers who are more fluent in English, the source text culture and receptor culture are the same. But if the readership includes people who are non-Hindi speakers in India , there might be culture-specific references that need explanation. Even then, the larger rubric of Indianness is adequate to tide over differences. However the situation is complicated by the fact that the book might have readers outside India who are not at all familiar with the milieu that has been depicted. The translator's strategy becomes a difficult choice here. The strategy being adopted increasingly by Indian English writers, of using native terms and phrases without translating them, is one way. But to what extent can this be used in a translation when you are trying to recapture somebody else's style and diction? If the translator uses too many glosses and footnotes, the Indian reader will be bored. She will lose her non-Indian readers if she does not explain most of the terms. So it is a tightrope-walk for the translator who has to be careful not to tilt the balance one way or the other.