Abstract
This article addresses the issue of the relevance of translating the political essays of Arundhati Roy into German within the framework of a globalized world and engages with the strategies and techniques of translation applied by the translators concerned. It also seeks to assess the degree of success achieved in translating the articles.
Roy's political essays, dealt with in this article, are located within a deterritorialised concept of cosmopolitanism as defined by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck. Beck's concept of "risk society" also underpins the argument for the emergence of a transnational civil society advocating the shared values of equality, social justice, diversity, empowerment of the grass-roots, democratic participation in decision-making and pacificity, transcending narrow national boundaries, interests and identities. The adhesive binding the risk society is a potential fear of eventual destruction or future crisis emerging from the unintended fall-out of man-made activities and of technology. It is argued that the cohesion of activist-oriented transnational civil society is predicated on potential fear of a future crisis such as that of an impending nuclear war or environmental disaster or terrorism. Against this background, it is contended that the political essays of Arundhati Roy serve to consolidate and contribute to the solidarity of transnational civil society. The translation of the essays, therefore, both widens and deepens transnational civil society – this is possible through the use of glocalisation both in the original and in translation, resulting in a possible intercultural dialogue, creating a common database of shared memory across the global community.
The article engages with the polemical style of the original and examines the manner in which this is reproduced in translation. It is further asserted that the use of generalization in the choice of words or phrases in translation tends to mute in translation the rather sharp criticism expressed in the original.
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