Cultural and Dialectical challenges in translation from Gujarati to English with reference to the short stories of Pannalal Patel

Abstract

Gujarati is a language gaining interest very fast among the people, not only in India but also in South Asia and North America. Apart from some regions in Pakistan and Rajasthan, it is spoken in union territories i.e. Diu, Daman and Dadra Nagar Haveli too. It is an Indo-Aryan language and almost 700 years old which is evolved from Sanskrit. Though it is named commonly as Gujarati, there are many other dialects of Guajarati practiced in Gujarat itself. Gujarati of Saurashtra is not completely similar to that of middle Gujarat or of North Gujarat. In Gujarati, there is a cliché relating the language bar gave boli badle, meaning language takes a change after every twelfth village. Here Boli is not a language but a dialect. Pannalal Patel is a Novelist and Short story writer and is credited with 61 novels and 26 short story collections. He belongs to Dungarpur which is in Rajasthan but he later moved to Ahmedabad. His language has rural touch in diction. A reader of Pannalal Patel would find many colloquial as well cultural words where one would also find the idioms from Sabarkantha district. These takes labour for a translator to understand him and translate his works. This paper attempts to bring out some such usages in Gujarat used by Pannalal which may challenge the task of translation. The four stories taken for the reference are Sukh Dukh na Sathi, Ek Raat ma, Ghadato Talati and Chaplaben roughly translated as Companions, Within a Night, Clerk in Making and Chaplaben respectively. The above-mentioned stories are taken from the collection of short stories of Pannalal Patel titled Sukh Dukh na Sathi (Comapnions).