Rewriting the Village: A Postcolonial Analysis of Translation Strategies in Gamperaliya

This paper explores how translation serves as a negotiation between the colonizer and colonized by examining the English translation of the Sinhala novel Gamperaliya (1944) by Martin Wickramasinghe, translated jointly into English as Uprooted (2009) by two Sri Lankan translators, Lakshmi De Silva and Ranga Wickramasinghe. Guided by a postcolonial framework and drawing on Lawrence Venuti’s concepts of Foreignization and domestication, the study addresses the following two research questions: 1) what translation strategies are employed in rendering Gamperaliya into English? and 2) how do these strategies reflect, reinforce or distort the power dynamics between the source and target cultures? The study adopts a qualitative approach followed by a comparative textual analysis of selected sentences and phrases from the source and target texts. Findings reveal that the prevalent approach employed for the translation is domestication, often resulting in cultural assimilation and a loss in cultural sensitivity of the source culture. However, the use of foreignization in certain cases underscores a deliberate attempt to challenge or resist colonial dominance by highlighting the ‘otherness’ of Sri Lankan culture. Although, it is hard to create a perfect translation and some degree of cultural loss is inevitable in any translation process, the findings reveal that strategic decisions of the translators significantly influence on representing the colonized culture, particularly in relation to postcolonial identity, power dynamics and cultural preservation. Thus, this study contributes to the issues related to postcolonial translation within the Sri Lankan context and provides insights into the complications of translating marginalized literatures into dominant languages.