Presentation by Ravi Kumar on Translators Persona, Sanskar, Habitus and Doxa
Creative Summary by Anna Darafeja
In this video,Mr. Ravi Kumar talks about the importance of a translator’s persona in understanding their translation works.
Translation theories have experienced major changes during development of the field since the very beginning. Initially having had focused on a word-to-word translation, which caused a lot of obstacles for the translation process as well as had some negative influence on the development of a language, theoreticians have then switched to the sense-to-sense translation, which seemed to be a great change in translation theories.
Although the text-centred sense-to-sense translation has brought major improvement and highly contributed to the development of translation theories, with historical, temporal and social aspects coming into the picture, the focus has now shifted to the translator’s personality as the key factor of translation.
Mr. Ravi Kumar talks about the translator being influenced by various social, historical and cultural factors and the effect this influence has on their work. Mr. Ravi Kumar also refers to works of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who drew on notions of habitus and doxa as key factors of a person’s image.
While doxa represents obvious fundamental beliefs affecting the translator, habitus is referring to their behavioural pattern of the translator as an individual. The image of the translator’s personality becomes a prominent factor in developing a deep understanding of their translation works, and hence the need of introducing and recognizing major translation, linguistics and literature workers comes into place.
