SILENCE MADE VISIBLE: EXPANSION STRATEGY FOLLOWED IN THE BLUE STING

Abstract

This study makes a comparison between Syed Shamsul Haq’s Bangla novel nīl daṃśan, the source text, and The Blue Sting, the target text translated by Kabir Chowdhury, to locate the instances where the inherent silences – as termed by Ortega y Gasset – of the source text are made visible in the target text. Based on the Liberation War of Bangladesh, the novel tells the story of a Kazi Nazrul Islam who was arrested by Pakistani soldiers mistakenly as his famous namesake, the rebel poet. They exercised all sorts of brutal methods of interrogation on the victim who finally faced death as boldly as the rebel poet would do in a similar context. In this study, the silences captured in the target text are expressed in terms of Nida and Taber’s concept of expansion. The comparison between the source text and the target text reveals that, among the four categories of syntactic expansions, the acts of “filling out of ellipses” are prominently visible; “identification of the participants in events” and “identification of objects or events with abstracts” are considerably visible, but “more explicit indication of relationals” is not visible in the translation. As for the three categories of lexical expansions, the use of “semantic restructuring” is prominent while that of “classifiers” and “descriptive substitutes” is quite considerable in The Blue Sting. The findings imply that there is enough scope for a translator to show their competence through their acts of capturing the source text silences and making them visible and hence accessible to the target readers.