Preservation and Promotion of an Indigenous Language through Translation (original) (raw)

2012, Journal of Nepalese literature, art and culture

The present paper draws on my personal experience of working on A Trilingual Dictionary of the Magar Language: Magar, Nepali and English (Athāra Magarāt). Like any other translators, I ventured on the project with the assumption that the source text lends itself to interpretation. The text can be oral or written, and the interpretation can be direct (when the interpreter/translator can read or understand the text in the source language itself) or indirect (when the translator/interpreter has another person interpret the text for him/her). In my case I had to rely on the secondary interpretation. Karna Bahādur Budā Magar interpreted the Magar words for me. The second assumption, what has been interpreted lends itself to rewriting in any language. However, these simplistic views about translation were later challenged, especially when I was translating cultural words into English. By their very nature, cultural words resisted straightforward interpretation and rewriting in Nepali and English. I often felt my interpretation and rewriting of Magar words were tied more to my own Nepali cultural experiences and formal knowledge of English than to Magar culture itself. This naturally caused distortion and fragmentation in the translation. Here I will touch on three broad areas of my observation: how preservation through lexical codification creates a prestige-based hierarchy; how preservation and promotion of a language through translation leads to cultural distortion and fragmentation; and how translators can employ different strategies to ensure better cultural representation in the face of distortion and fragmentation. Journal of Nepalese Literature, Art and Culture 25

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