Linguistics - Page 3

Febin Vijay¹ and Priyanka Tripathi²

¹Junior Research Fellow (PhD), Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. febinvijay777@gmail.com

²Associate Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. ORCID: 0000-0002-9522-3391.

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.20

Abstract

The present article begins with a brief historical account of the exclusionary politics of Western crime fiction, with most of the works representing the East as ‘exotic other’ while assuming the subject position themselves. A post-colonial analysis of Abir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man (2016) is conducted to study how the novel deals with questions of justice and racial politics, and further encompasses a brief inquiry into it can be positioned as an anti-colonial text which advocates a move towards decolonization. The text can be seen as representing the body of work by writers who give voice to the oppressed within colonial contexts and vehemently refuse the idea of being inferior.

Keywords: post-colonial, justice, race, crime, violence.

Azhar Uddin Sahaji

Assistant Professor (ad hoc), Department of English, Zakir Husain Delhi College (M), University of Delhi. ORCID id: 0000-0001-8675-4716. Email: info.azharsahaji@gmail.com  

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.19

Abstract

In contemporary India, through popular Punjabi, Bollywood songs, we often come across the word “Noor” (tere chehre ka noor etc.) in reference to a female beauty most of the times. We have become so familiar with the word that we almost forgot that the Arabic original word gained its immortal significance when it is mentioned in the Quran in association with the God. The exact and a fixed meaning of the of word “Noor” is not given in the Quran and perhaps, that gives an opportunity which enabled the word to travel worldwide in different languages with different significance attached to it, from spiritual Sufi literature to sensational pop music. This paper will attempt to show how the word Noor has been translated, transliterated, adopted not just literally but the spiritual and religious significances attached to it. This paper will argue that the word Noor itself has  not gone through so much of translation apart from transliteration but the significance associated with it have gone through tremendous translations in different languages and cultures. The paper will also argue that the journey of the word through different linguistic and cultural spheres have lost some of its significance as well gained significances through the process of translation.

Keywords: Noor, Translation, Adaptation, Arabic, Persian, Vernacular languages, Punjabi/Hindi Pop Songs

Amritha Koiloth Ramath & Shashikantha Koudur

National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal. E-mail ids: amrithakr27@gmail.com/ sasikant@nitk.edu.in

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.18

Abstract

This paper looks at Hermann Gundert’s Malayalam-English dictionary at the juncture of the modernisation of the Malayalam language in the 19^th century.  Gundert, the then inspector of schools in the Malabar district, saw the dictionary as the first step towards the cause of a universal education through the standardisation of Malayalam language. But what did a dictionary for all and by implication a language for all mean to the Kerala society? For centuries, much of the literary output in Kerala was in Sanskrit language, even as Malayalam continued its sway.  The diversity of the language system in Kerala navigated its way through the hierarchies of caste and class tensions, springing up new genres from time to time within these dichotomies. Like many other vernacular languages in India, the Malayalam language system remained as the society it was in, decentralised and plural. This fell into sharp relief against the language systems of modern post-renaissance Europe with its standardised languages and uniform education. The colonial project in India aimed at reconstructing the existing language hierarchies by standardising the vernaculars and replacing Sanskrit as the language of cosmopolitan reach and cultural hegemony with English. Bilingualism and translation was key to this process as it seemed to provide a point of direct cultural linkage between the vernacular Indian cultures and Europe. This paper argues that  Gundert’s bilingual dictionary features itself in this attempt at the modernisation of Malayalam by reconstructing the existing hierarchies of Kerala culture through the standardisation of Malayalam and the replacement of Sanskrit with a new cosmopolitan language and cultural values.

Keywords: Bilingual Dictionary, Colonial Language Policy, Vernacular, Education, Malayalam

Amal Tom¹ and Nagendra Kumar²

¹PhD candidate, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Roorkee, India. ORCID: 0000-0002-6072-0451 Email: amal_t@hs.iitr.ac.in

²Professor, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Roorkee, India. ORCID: 0000-0002-8292-7947. Email: nagendra.kumar@hs.iitr.ac.in

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.17

Abstract

Contemporary time necessitated the use of advanced, scientific and digital technologies to take forward the teaching-learning process uninterrupted, making teaching online effective, cheap, convenient, and an alternative to traditional classes. It has been a drastic change that revolutionised English Language classes. Unprecedented levels of digitalisation in the field of education cropped up many logistical and pedagogical problems. This research paper attempts to look into these problems through a survey, analysing the different perspectives and approaches of individual teachers in developing and evaluating language skills, developing primers and ICT tools, and using them for effective, pleasurable online language teaching-learning, making classes student-centred. It also analysed the scope of making online and traditional classrooms supplementary and complementary to each other. Certainly, there is a need for better infrastructure, training, connectivity, integration of Augmented and Virtual Reality to provide experiential learning and to cope up with emerging challenges

Keywords: Online classes, I.C.T. Tools, Evaluation, Syllabus, Teaching-Learning Process.

Shanthi Murugan & Balasundaram S R

Department of Computer Applications, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli.

Email: shanthicse9@gmail.com & blsundar@nitt.edu

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.16

Abstract

Assessment plays an important role in learning and Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) are quite popular in large-scale evaluations. Technology enabled learning necessitates a smart assessment. Therefore, automatic MCQ generation became increasingly popular in the last two decades. Despite a large amount of research effort, system generated MCQs are not useful in real educational applications. This is because of the inability to produce the diverse and human alike distractors. Distractors are the wrong choices given along with the correct answer (key) to confuse the examinee. Especially, in educational domain (grammar learning) the MCQs deal with affix-based or morphologically transformed distractors. In this paper, we present a method for automatic generation of affix-based distractors for fill-in-the-blanks for learning Tamil Vocabulary. Affix-based distractor generation relies on certain regularities manifest in high dimensional spaces. We investigate the quality of distractors generated by a number of criteria, including Part-Of-Speech, difficulty level, spelling, word co-occurrence, semantic similarity and affixation. We evaluated our proposed method in grammar based Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) dataset. The result shows that affix-based distractors, yield significantly more plausible outcomes in certain grammar based questions.

Keywords: Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs), Assessment, affix-based distractors, grammar, automatic generation.

Shilpi Gupta

Ph.D. Scholar, Women and Gender Studies, University of Granada, Spain. Email: shilpigupta.jnu@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.15

Abstract:

This paper is a part of a project of translation of the book of Gloria Anzaldúa’ Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) in Indian language(s). Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza is one of the path-breaking books which came in the time when Afro-American feminism already stood in opposition to white feminism by questioning the Euro-American centric feminism. Anzaldúa started discussing Chicana feminism together with black feminism. Her book Borderlands is a painful but challenging narration of those who live on the ‘barbwire’ between Mexico and the USA. In defining the border, she goes beyond the physical meaning to its symbolic significance, and one of them is language. Language in her book has been uniquely presented as an identity that is multilingual, creolized, mestiza and subaltern language. Hence, her book is a challenge in the field of translation, especially in Indian context where languages have political, social and historical impact.  Considering the above book as a project, I would primarily discuss why this book should be translated considering the Indian context? What are the different ways in which the translation can be defined in translating a text from One-Third world to another Third world? In this process, we find it relevant to revise the language and its relations to power in a postcolonial India, taking into account caste, class, and colonial discourse. This epitome opens a debate to enter into the new political strategies which Gloria Anzaldúa propagates through her book “Nueva Conciencia Mestiza” as moving towards “new language” which could be more inclusive.

Keywords: Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, translation, Indian languages, postcolonial India, Politics of Language

Sushant Kumar Mishra

Professor, Centre for French and Francophone Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Emails: sushantkmishra@mail.jnu.ac.in, sushantjnu@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.14

Abstract:

Translation related issues have been explored since times immemorial in various societies of the world. Transferring language-based knowledge systems and experiences have been an exclusive faculty of the human species. Paraphrasing vs metaphrasing in translating texts have been important concerns of translators while expressing the thoughts in texts of language into another language. Should there be a politics of these two approaches being applied as per the ideological requirements? In the background of this question, we need to understand how and why the successors of Saussure continued working on the stylistic categories of expressions of ordinary language usages while often comparing the two language pairs also in the context of style and translation. The presentation aims to explore the translation theories in the context of the ideological requirements of their times and continues to understand the comparative stylistic categories of Saussure’s successors which are useful in practically translating a text.

Keywords: Stylistic Categories, Translation, Language Pairs, text, metaphrastic styles

Panchanan Mohanty

GLA University, Mathura. E-mail: panchananmohanty@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.13

Abstract

Though translation activities are more than two millennia old, the most significant activities in this field took place in the 20^th century. To be specific, contradictory theoretical positions were taken and entirely new kinds of questions were asked in the second half of this century. Scholars like Susan Bassnett (1998) even claimed that a translation should be treated as an independent and original text. But a number of writers, translators and scholars hold an opposite view. If we consider the translation activities of the ancient western civilizations of the world, we notice that those were mostly commissioned and literal in nature. Contrary to it, the situation in India was different. Though Valmiki and Vyasa composed the Ramayana and the Mahabharata respectively for the first time in Sanskrit, the Ramayanas and Mahabharatas written later in various vernacular languages of India are adaptations or transcreations. A careful analysis of the European, Arabic, and Chinese traditions show that those were literate in comparison with the vernacular Indian tradition that was predominantly oral. This orality gave a lot of freedom to the writers in the vernacular languages in ancient India to be creative and compose new texts. Therefore, orality was the driving force for this creativity and some western scholars’ proposal that a translated text is an original text in not a new concept.

The other point I would like to make is that contrary to the popular belief, a literal translation of a literary text is also appreciated more (Newmark 1988:70-71). This position is validated in two of our case studies, i.e. Mohanty et al. (2008) and Mohanty and Sarath Chandra (2014). Therefore, I want to argue that ‘free’ translation was the mainstream in the climate of orality and not in literacy. This free trend endorsed by those scholars who treat translations as original texts is peripheral in the contemporary literate societies in which translations are usually commissioned. I will also argue that the differences between the free and the literal trends in translation are primarily due to the oral and the literate traditions that prevailed in India and in the other parts of the world mentioned above in the olden days.

Keywords: Translation Studies, Orality, Literacy, Transcreation