Translating Deixes: A Descriptive Study Of The English Translation Of Urdu Short Story /Overcoat/ By Abass

Abstract

This study discusses the phenomenon of Translating Urdu deixes into English with special emphasis on honorifics and gender-specific expressions. The selected data were taken from the short story, Overcoat, by Abass (1981), from the intermediate textbook of class 11th. Researchers preferred these texts because translation is also done by the same writer, which can help to determine the level at which translation resists the translation process. The study aims to explore distinctive linguistic features and properties of Urdu deixes and their English translations. It attempts to discover that deixes reflect a particular society's socio-cultural structure. It also focuses on the process of translation of deixes and the specific deictic expressions which pose challenges to the translator most frequently. There are multiple dimensions of deixis to look at, but this study only focuses on honorifics and gender aspects of deixes to determine the study's objectives. The study results show that Urdu culture designates cultural roles to refer faculty in society based on social status and relations, while English does not. The results also show that there are norms for language: Urdu language is considered gender exclusive, while English is gender inclusive but in the case of deictic expressions Urdu deictic expressions are gender inclusive, and English expressions are gender exclusive. Thus, this is an addition to the existing research on the platform of deixes. Thus the study adds a new dimension to deixes, as the equivalent of Urdu deixes in English functions differently based on different socio-cultural paradigms in both cultures. Hence, deictic expressions are culturally distinctive linguistic units. Being part of the language, they resist translating from ST to TT. The distinctive trait of this research is that it found out that at the deixes level, some Urdu deictic expressions are inclusive, and some English expressions are exclusive against their linguistic rules, such as Urdu-Gender exclusive English-gender inclusive.