Translating Women in Sethu’s Malayalam Fiction into English: The Issue of Cultural Gaps

Abstract

As time passes, there is a greater appreciation of the role of Translation Studies in understanding a woman’s point of view. How to embody female discourses in translation has become a significant issue in working on a Target Language (TL) text. The present study focus on the translated text titled ‘Once Upon a Time’ (2014; tr. K.T. Rajagopalan), initially written in Malayalam titled ‘Adayalangal’ (2005) by Sethu. Through this study, we analyze a translator’s literary depiction of central female characters in a woman-oriented Malayalam fiction. There is an evident loss of the essence of Kerala cultural history and its customs on the one hand, and the invisibility of the feminist voice in the text. The study explores the cultural gaps in depicting the central women characters through translation, and also, how the translator depicts women’s issues, gender inequalities and handling stereotypes through translation.