Techniques And Cultural Gap In Translation : A Case of The Travelogue Jang Bahadurko Belait Yatra

Abstract

The research work entitled Techniques and Cultural Gaps in Translation. A Case of The Travelogue 'Jang Bahadurko Belait-Yatra' was an attempt to identify the Nepali cultural terms of a travelogue to find out the techniques employed in the translation process of these terms into TL text and also to point out gaps created in the process of translating SL text into TL text. This study was carried out by adopting qualitative method in general and survey research design in particular. The required data were collected from the secondary source i.e.Nepali and English version of a travelogue by using judgmental non-probability (non-random) sampling procedure.For the research work, I selected 150 cultural terms from source text and its equivalent terms from translated version. Those collected terms were categorized into five different categories on the basis of Newmark (1998) framework as they are ecology, material culture, social culture and organization, religious culture and conceptual terms(Gesture and habits). Some of the cultural terms that I selected to conduct my study were, i.e. pahelopath, memshahibs, dada, patharkochano,e.t.c.From the finding of my study, nine different techniques were found to be employed by the translator to translate source text into target text. They are literal translation,sense translation, mistranslation, definition, deletion, addition, substitution,borrowing, and claque. Among nine different techniques of translation, literal translation (26%) was the most frequently used techniques whereas claque (6%) was least used techniques. Similarly, the techniques that were employed to translate a cultural terms also create gaps such maiya-daughter, brichha-bush etc. The study consist of five chapters. The first chapter deals with general background, statement of the problem, objectives of the study, research questions,significance of the study, delimitation of the study, and operational definition of the key terms. The second chapter deals with the review of the theoretical and empirical literature and conceptual framework of the study.Likewise, the third chapter deals with methodology adopted for the study,design of the study,population,sample,sampling strategy, research tools, sources of data, data collection procedure of the study.The fourth chapter deals with the analysis and interpretation of the collected data descriptively using simple statistical tool i.e. percentage.Similarly,the fifth chapter deals with the finding based on the analysis and interpretation of the data, conclusion derived from the findings and recommendations. This chapter is followed by references and appendices.