Browsing by Author "Bamunusinghe, S."

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Portrayal of War through Literature: A Critical Literature Review of the Sri Lankan Anglophone Writers
(Faculty of Graduate Studies - University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2021) Bamunusinghe, S.; Senaratne, C. D.
Between 1983 and 2009, Sri Lanka experienced a bleak and violent war that had a significant political, cultural, and economic impact on the country's social setting. Domains of English, Sinhala, and Tamil literature in Sri Lanka also changed during this period, and a number of poems, fiction, drama, and films were written in response to the war, both during and after it ended. The Sri Lankan Anglophone writers who produce literature in response to the war, represents residential Sri Lankans as well as the authors of the diaspora. This critical literature review examines the contribution of Sri Lankan Anglophone literature to literary scholarship and explores the role it fulfills in portraying the war in Sri Lanka through literature. An ample number of studies pertaining to Sri Lankan Anglophone literature were reviewed and the study also selected four novels which are set against the backdrop of the war to identify the role that they play in portraying war through literature. Findings of the review indicate that some critics consider Sri Lankan Anglophone literature as a platform which plays a substantial role as a mode for dialogue and reconciliation while some consider it as literary compositions created by the English-speaking class for its own class. The selected novels show that they fulfill the role of a messenger and present the war and the country’s collective tragedy to the outer world through literary compositions, surpassing censored war records. This review concludes that the Sri Lankan Anglophone literature plays a significant role as a medium for communication and reconciliation, although it is not written or read by the non-Anglophone majority of the country.
Translating Proper Names
(University of Kelaniya, 2015) Bamunusinghe, K.; Bamunusinghe, S.
The Oxford Dictionary defines a proper noun as “a name used for an individual person, place, or organization, spelled with an initial capital” while the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines it as “a word or group of words that is the name of a particular person, place, or thing and that usually begins with a capital letter.” Paying attention to the above definitions it is apparent that proper names are used in identifying a person, place, an organization or a thing. Translating proper names or proper nouns is of importance to translators who needs to pay attention in translating their meaning and usage in the source language. Hervey and Higgins in their textThinking Translation (1986) have presented three strategies when translating Proper Nouns/Names, namelyExotism, Transliteration and Cultural Transplantation. On the other hand, proper names can also be found under the cultural categories presented by Peter Newmark, who stated that “you have to look up all proper names you do not know. First, geographical terms” (1988). Though translating proper names is considered an easy task the translator’s knowledge of unknown proper names is crucial. Here, the onus is on the translator to research further on the proper names before translating a text, in particular, the proper names ofthe target language.