A Study on the Techniques And Gaps in Translation of Cultural Terms: A Case of Short Stories ‘Vidrohi’

Abstract

The thesis entitled A Study on the Techniques and Gaps in Translation of Cultural Terms: A Case of Short Stories ‘Vidrohi’ is an attempt to identify the translated Nepali cultural terms of the short stories ‘Vidrohhi’ to find out the techniques employed in the translation process of these terms in the TL text and to point out gaps created in this process. For this study, I collected 100 translated Nepali cultural terms from the short stories of the book. For the purpose, I identified the cultural category of these terms. They are ecology, material culture, social culture, religious culture, and conceptual terms. Upon the analysis of the collected data, I came up with ten techniques used in the translation of Nepali cultural terms of the stories. They are literal translation, substitution, borrowing, sense translation, blending, deletion, definition, addition, couplet and mistranslation. Similarly, the study concludes that among the techniques, literal, substitution and borrowing are the most widely used techniques while translating the cultural terms. I found that wider gaps have been created when the translator borrowed and deleted the cultural terms. The study has been divided into four chapters. The first chapter introduces the study in terms of general background, literature review, objectives and significance of the study. The second chapter is an account of the methodology applied to carry out the research and the limitations of the study. The third chapter deals with the analysis and interpretation of the data by using some statistical tools to make the study objective and accurate. The fourth and the final chapter presents the findings and recommendations made on the basis of the analysis and interpretation of the data.