The Intersection of Translators’ Ideology and Linguistic Context: Jayanti Dalal and Harendra Bhatt in a Comparative Framework

Abstract

The paper attempts to critically examine two literary translations of George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945) into the Gujarati language. The two translations published in chronological order are Pashurajya (October 1947 ;) translated by Jayanti Dalal (1909–1970) and Chopaga Nu Raj (2015 ;) translated by Harendra Bhatt (1953). Both the translations are viewed through the observations of translation theorists Lawrence Venuti, Eugene Nida, and Peter Newmark with regard to what makes a good translation. While the question of whether these translations of the source text were alert to George Orwell’s political ideology and the resonances was paid attention to, how the translations are placed particularly within the Gujarati language and its culture is closely examined. Similarly, the analytical study situates the author and his text in their particular historical context and seeks to determine how the translations of the source text are likewise informed by the translators’ political and individual ideologies and the lexical choices they made in translating the text and relocating it within the Gujarati milieu. Critically, both the translations contain complex issues related to their lexical variations, translators’ potentialities and their ideologies that will help to distinguish the translated texts in many ways. In the linguistic equivalence approach, the use of colloquial words, renaming of characters’ names and translation of the sentence struc ture in both the translations are found to be diverse because of one of the translators’ choices of exercising liberty and their potentialities. The translator’s use of freely added sentences will also be examined in Chopaga Nu Raj. The comparative study concludes, by linguistically examining the translation of Minimus’s poem in Pashurajya and Chopaga Nu Raj.