Creative Shifts in Poetry Translation

Abstract

This study entitled Creative Shifts in Poetry Translation intended to identify the ways of maintaining creative shifts in poetry translation and find out the frequency of each way. Creative shifts occur in the translation through translators’ effort, creation and psychology that correspond to the SL context. To address the objectives, the researcher used both the SL (Nepali) and TL (English) versions. Forty stanzas were selected through purposive non-random sampling strategy from the both SL and TL. Since the researcher adopted a survey research design, the data were analyzed through observation using simple statistical tool. After analyzing the data, it has been found that shifts are inevitable in translation. Various ways or procedures; namely, literal, substitution, addition, deletion, definition, borrowing, lexical creation, and sense translation, are adopted by the translators while making translation, as a result, there arrive creative shifts. Among all, literal translation is the highly occurred translation in this study. Similarly, the shifts in various levels, namely; structure, unit, class and inter-system that a translator is forced to make in translation, help to maintain creative shifts. Among all, unit shift is the most occurred shift in this study. Psychologically, the occurrence of these shifts reflects the translator's awareness of the linguistic and non-linguistic discrepancies between the SL and TL. Translators try to reproduce the meaning in relation to contextual, semantic, cultural, and pragmatic properties; as a result there occur creative changes or shifts in translation. Moreover, creative shifts occur due to the shifting of grammatical unit as well as linguistic changes occur between SL and TL. This study comprises five chapters. The first chapter presents the background of the study, statement of the problem, objectives of the study, research questions, significance of the study, delimitations of the study and operational definitions of the key terms. The second chapter consists of the review of related theoretical literature, review of empirical literature, implications of the study and conceptual framework. In the same way, chapter three includes design of the study, population, sample and sampling strategy, research tools, sources of data, data collection procedures, data analysis procedures and ethical considerations. The fourth chapter is about analysis of data and interpretations of result. And the five chapter deals with findings, conclusion and recommendations which are summed up from the analysis and interpretations of the collected data for the purpose of research. The references and appendices have been included in the last part of the thesis