Re-writings and Colonial Voices

A Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

The study highlights the traces of translator’s positional superiority in colonial rewritings. It argues that the worldview of the translator influences his/her interpretation of source text realities. It maintains that translator’s strategic decisions (lexical, syntactic and textual choices) reflect his perspective, position and sociopolitical relations with the source text (ST) culture. And Para-texts (prefaces, footnotes, explanatory notes, Appendices etc.) are the more vulnerable ideological spaces wherein ST realities can be manipulated most commonly. The two English translations of Urdu fiction Bagh-o-Bahar have been selected for collecting data. The discussion reveals that the rewritten and reconstructed English versions of ST represent the colonized culture as colonial other and the culture of the translators seem to be the role of arbitrator. It establishes that the ideological position of the translators is that of colonizers as they view ST as a colony and treat it accordingly in the process of translation. The translators seem playing a sociological and ideological role in establishing the dialogical relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. And it also finds that the translators in the process of translation could not step out of their own sociocultural and ideological perspectives.