An Analysis of Culture-Specific Items in the French Translation VIRAGAYA ou le non-attachement of the Sinhala Novel Viragaya

Abstract

Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) are the concepts which are specific for a language. The notions of these concepts differ from culture to culture. The CSIs employed in the novel Viragaya (1956) written by Martin Wickramasinghe have been analyzed with reference to its French translation VIRAGAYA ou le non-attachement (1995) translated by Bikku Mandawala Pannawansa. Wickramasinghe’s story brings out a philosophy of Buddhism; ‘viragaya’- a state where all desire, attachments, feelings are purged from the mind and it is presented through his protagonist Aravinda who is a product of the rural Buddhist background. In the process of translation, the French translator has targeted a reader who is neither familiar with Sinhala language nor its culture. Nevertheless, the translator used various translational strategies to transfer Sinhala CSIs in to French language in order to minimize the language gap between these two cultures. Thus, this study aims to categorize the gathered source language words, to identify the translational strategies used in the translation of CSIs of Sinhala to French, to find out the frequency of the translational strategies which leads to identify the most frequently employed strategy. The present study conducted based on both qualitative and quantitative methods. Collected data related to CSIs are discussed under 14 sub categories considering Peter Newmark’s Categorization of CSIs and Howard’s proposed categorizations. Then a total of 75 CSIs is analyzed using Eirlys E. Davies’s proposed taxonomy of preservation, addition, omission, globalisation, localisation, transformation. The findings highlight firstly, the strategy of preservation, globalization and the combination of preservation and addition are frequently used by the translator. Secondly, the most prevailing strategy is preservation which helps to preserve the local flavor added in the original. Thirdly, the strategy of preservation is used in the categorizations of species of flora and fauna, food culture, person names and place names, social related terms and employment, religious terms. The preserved cases are often explained with footnotes to assist the French reader to minimize the strangeness of the foreign text. This particular analysis is effective in the field of translation to identify the translational strategies used by the French translator when translating Sinhalese CSIs to French language