post-colonial_translation

The case of the Indian English novel 47
use is alike a lived practice, coercive, and a means of choice’ (Tonkin
1993: 188).
The choice of one language variety over another as much as of one
language over another ‘signals social meanings to listeners and readers’.
Hence it is important to examine ‘acts and choices: on shifts between
different languages, between a standard and non-standard dialect or a
mixture of all these, according to the social situation’ (ibid.). Tonkin
adds that ‘many shades of social meaning’ can be conveyed by people
‘by their choice of sound, word or grammar, and it is common for them
to code-switch, that is move from one variety to another, even in the
course of a sentence’ (ibid.: 188–9). Code-mixing and code-switching
are both communicative strategies and can have various motivations.
Code-switching, for example, may be used to reveal to the listener the
regional identity of the speaker, thus enabling the speaker to establish
kinship if the listener belongs to the same region. Code-switching can
also be used to reveal class and religion. Conversely, code-switching
can also be resorted to in order to conceal the speaker’s region, class or
religion. Thus code-switching may be used in a conversation to establish
affinity with one or more persons while excluding others who do not
belong to this linguistic or class or religious group. Code-mixing plays
a similar role and often marks the context of the conversation. Codemixing
in English while speaking an Indian language, for example, may
mark a professional or academic context. Code-mixing in a ‘neutral’
language like English will reveal rather than conceal region, class,
religion, caste and gender. It may alert us to a local register or may define
a concept or term, keeping alive the Indian nuances. A bilingual writer
of English (and this category includes almost all Indian writers in
English) walks this tightrope of choices carefully and consciously.
Further, the contexts of these Indian English writers are often
multilingual and multicultural; certainly the dominant culture around
them is not British or Western. Hence even when there may be nothing
unintelligible or seemingly translated in a piece of Indian English writing,
a reader from a different culture may have difficulty in fully
understanding or interpreting the text. Using examples from Nayantara
Sahgal, R.K. Narayan and Bharti Mukherjee, Yamuna Kachru
demonstrates how
they are fully interpretable only in the context of conventions of
a community that uses kinship terms as instruments of politeness,
has a belief system that accommodates astrology as relevant to
human endeavours, has an institution of arranged marriage, and