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Title An Analysis of the Urdu Translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the Ideological Perspective

Author(s) SEHRISH KARIM

Abstract In the modern age, the field of translation studies is progressing steadily and new developments are taking place. However, this study argues that translation is not just a linguistic tool but is taken as a tool for the manipulation of ideology, too. The present study focuses on the changes that occur when the source text which is an international legal document, i.e., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is translated into the target text. The declaration first written in English was translated into Urdu. Primarily inspired by the theoretical framework presented by Hatim and Mason (1990, 1991 & 1997) and for scrutinizing and evaluating translated texts, the researcher analyzed the target text by taking into account the set of constraints related to text, genre and discourse through which the ideology is expressed. To identify the translator’s ideological tendencies, the research emphasizes primarily the textual features, viz., modality shift, transitivity shift and nominalization, with the selection of lexical items signifying domestication along with a handful of the recurrence of certain words. The results show that the translator has deliberately or unintentionally made significant changes in choosing syntactic structures and lexical items in comparison to those used in the original text. The results of the study also demonstrate that many alterations or changes between the source and the target text were not only arbitrary, but were laden ideologically with particular aims and purposes. The analysis of the selected data shows despite the general assumption that legal translations are literal, legal documents can be translated in a different way depending on their context and reason. The study concludes that significant differences in purposes and goals of translation may bring significant differences in the communicated ideologies between the source and the target text.

Type Thesis/Dissertation MS

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2022-04-01

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Rights