Bridging Voices: Socio-Cultural Challenges in Translating Anna Bhau Sathe’s Khulvadi
Keywords:
Caste, Culture, Folk Idioms, Oral Tradition, Socio-cultural Gaps, TransliterationAbstract
This study examines the socio-cultural and linguistic complexities involved in translating Khulvadi, a seminal collection of short stories by the veteran Marathi writer and poet Anna Bhau Sathe, into English. The study investigates how translation mediates caste-marked realities, oral storytelling traditions, and regional folk idioms. For the methodology, the research utilizes a qualitative, practice-based comparative textual analysis drawing directly from the author's translation manuscript Khulwadi: 9 Stories by Anna Bhau Sathe. It incorporates postcolonial translation frameworks, Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural semiotics, and Roman Jakobson’s models of interlingual divergence to evaluate specific mediation strategies. Regarding the main findings, the study demonstrates that literal or automated translations fail to communicate the depth of lived Dalit experiences and the political undertones in Sathe’s work. Standard English lacks semantic equivalents for caste-based spatial segregation and regional folk expressions. An effective translation must combine strategic transliteration with contextual annotations to retain cultural meaning while ensuring global accessibility. In terms of applications, this research contributes to the fields of subaltern literature, postcolonial translation studies, and the representation of marginalized voices in global languages, offering a methodological framework for translating dialect-heavy regional texts. The novelty and originality of this study lies in addressing a critical gap by providing practice-led insights into the unique challenges of translating Anna Bhau Sathe's orally inflected, performance-driven prose, emphasizing that translation of subaltern narratives is a political and ethical act of witness rather than a mechanical linguistic exercise.
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