A Study of English Translations of Manto’s Short Story “Mummy” under Lawrence Venuti’s Theories of Translation

Manto is a distinguished name of Urdu fiction. Due to individuality of the themes, his short stories are popular not only among Urdu readers but they have also gained popularity at the international level too. The one reason of this international popularity is that his short stories are translated into English. This is the fact that an English translation of a piece of literature increases its international readership, but it is also important to keep in m in d that the translated text is never the same as the original. During the translation, some of the beauty of stylistics remains in the text. It often happens that the culture of the source text is different from the culture of the target text and hence the languages used in the two texts are also different. These differences often prevent some particulars of the source text from imparting into the translation. Translation experts have introduced various strategies to reduce this discrepancy between text and translation and to maintain a balance between text and translation. One of the well-known strategies proposed by the American translation expert Lawrence Venuti is known as “domestication and foreignization”. This paper examines two English translations of Manto's short stories "Mummy" in the light of the strategies proposed by Lawrence Venuti. The reason for the selection of the topic is that there is no existing research whether Manto’s fiction is translated accordingly or not. Comparative Research method is used to analyze the gap between source text and translated text. The findings of the study will be analyzed through the lens of Venuti’s translation theories in the conclusion.