Translational Style: A Corpus-Based Comparative Analysis of English Translations of Urdu Fiction by Memon and Naqvi

Muhammad Javed Iqbal; Masroor Sibtain; Rabia Shahzadi

doi:10.36902/sjesr-vol3-iss3-2020(283-292)

Muhammad Javed Iqbal Centre for Languages and Translation Studies, University of Gujrat, Pakistan
Masroor Sibtain Assistant Professor, Government College of Science, Multan, Pakistan
Rabia Shahzadi Lecturer, Zamindara College, Gujrat, Pakistan

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36902/sjesr-vol3-iss3-2020(283-292)

Keywords: Translational Style, Comparative Analysis, Open Class Lexis, Corpora, Stylistic Marker

Abstract

The present paper comparatively analyzes English translations of Urdu fiction by Umer Memon and Saeed Naqvi to identify translational stylistic features. The data for this paper consists of two corpora; the first corpus comprises Memon’s translations (TR1) and the second corpus consists of Naqvi’s translations (TR2). To validate the results, the paper takes Corpus of Canons of Western Literature (CCWL) as a reference corpus. Open class lexis is taken as a stylistic marker. All the three corpora are tagged through Stanford tagger (Toutanova, 2003), and the frequencies of open class lexis are acquired by using AntConc (3.4.4). It is found that TR1 and TR2 show almost the same stylistic qualities on the use of proper nouns, lexical verbs, past tense, comparative and superlative adjectives, and comparative and superlative adverbs. However, the variance occurs in the use of count nouns and proper plural nouns. This paper will contribute to better understand the stylistic features of English translations of Urdu fiction and the trending modes of English translation itself.