Dr. Archita Gupta
Post Graduate Teacher in English, Henry Derozio Academy, Directorate of Secondary Education,Government of Tripura.
ORCID ID:0000-0001-6030-141x. Email: architagupta82@gmail.com
Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.52
Abstract
The present study focuses on the translation of a pure Bengali vernacular strip Nonte Fonte in English and to colour and its reception across the Bengali reading and speaking populace especially of Tripura, a North Eastern state of which the researcher is a part. At the same time this paper also highlights the way in which an apparently innocent comic strip such as Nonte Fonte showcases and disseminates, naturalizes and legitimizes stereotypes that represent negative codification of the cultural ‘Other’ (the inhabitant of Orissa relocated to Kolkata for work for instance) through its image /illustration medium and how the target reader internalizes it. Attempt has also been made to locate how market forces and the demand of English readership/target culture influence the translated product/text, thus pertaining to Bassnet’s (2007) concept of cultural capital which can be loosely defined as that which is necessary for an individual to belong to the ‘right circle’ in the society (p.19). Translation helps a culture to come closer to the ‘cultural capital’ of the other. The concept of cultural capital is most pertinent to the power relation, concept of hierarchy and negotiation involved in translation in this context. Cultural capital here is not the Source Text (ST), but the Western canon of English language and English readership (global readership in English in this context that would generally define itself as a summation of the Bengali (with or without Bengali reading competence, but with English reading competence) and non- Bengali but English reading domains in India and the rest of the English reading world). However as has been pointed out later in this paper, the publisher tends to contain and restrict the consumption of his product- the text thus translated, within a supposed niche of target readership, the Bengali children. The paper also interrogates the impracticality of such a proposition.
Keywords: Image, translation, codification, transmediation, reader-response.