International Postgraduate Research Conference (IPRC)
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Item An Analysis of Culture-Specific Items in the French Translation VIRAGAYA ou le non-attachement of the Sinhala Novel Viragaya(19th Conference on Postgraduate Research, International Postgraduate Research Conference 2018, Faculty of Graduate Studies,University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2018) Samarasinghe, H.Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) are the concepts which are specific for a language. The notions of these concepts differ from culture to culture. The CSIs employed in the novel Viragaya (1956) written by Martin Wickramasinghe have been analyzed with reference to its French translation VIRAGAYA ou le non-attachement (1995) translated by Bikku Mandawala Pannawansa. Wickramasinghe’s story brings out a philosophy of Buddhism; ‘viragaya’- a state where all desire, attachments, feelings are purged from the mind and it is presented through his protagonist Aravinda who is a product of the rural Buddhist background. In the process of translation, the French translator has targeted a reader who is neither familiar with Sinhala language nor its culture. Nevertheless, the translator used various translational strategies to transfer Sinhala CSIs in to French language in order to minimize the language gap between these two cultures. Thus, this study aims to categorize the gathered source language words, to identify the translational strategies used in the translation of CSIs of Sinhala to French, to find out the frequency of the translational strategies which leads to identify the most frequently employed strategy. The present study conducted based on both qualitative and quantitative methods. Collected data related to CSIs are discussed under 14 sub categories considering Peter Newmark’s Categorization of CSIs and Howard’s proposed categorizations. Then a total of 75 CSIs is analyzed using Eirlys E. Davies’s proposed taxonomy of preservation, addition, omission, globalisation, localisation, transformation. The findings highlight firstly, the strategy of preservation, globalization and the combination of preservation and addition are frequently used by the translator. Secondly, the most prevailing strategy is preservation which helps to preserve the local flavor added in the original. Thirdly, the strategy of preservation is used in the categorizations of species of flora and fauna, food culture, person names and place names, social related terms and employment, religious terms. The preserved cases are often explained with footnotes to assist the French reader to minimize the strangeness of the foreign text. This particular analysis is effective in the field of translation to identify the translational strategies used by the French translator when translating Sinhalese CSIs to French languageItem The strategies used by the translators to depict the French cultural aspects into Sinhala(Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2015) Ekanayake, E.M.V.R.S.A variety of languages with different cultures has created a great demand for the translation in the current diversified society. Translation, according to Marianne Lederer, is a process of reading, understanding of a source language text and rewriting it in a target language. We create a similar situation in foreign language. Therefore, the translation plays an important role on crossing through different cultures and communication. Thus, the translators are always in the risk of finding the terms for their translations as they have to fully comprehend the idea and the environment of the source text. There are idioms, colloquial terms, borrowings, special terminologies in the domain and cultural expressions which make the task of a translator more complicate. This paper provides an insight to the strategies used by the Sinahala translators, who translate directly from French, to portray the source French culture in Sinahala. Encompassing the theory of source oriented or target oriented by Jean-Rene Ladmiral, it explicates the methods of two Sinhala translators who have translated the novel : L‘etranger by a great French novelist Albert Camus. To be more specific on the methodology, which is a descriptive analysis, the author depicts how these translators have presented the French cultural aspects which include the behavior, courtship, morals, customs, clothing, institutions, and beliefs etc. in their Sinhala translation. Having acknowledged the content of the translations, and vividly analyzing the strategies, it is evident that each translator has his own method of presenting the cultural aspects. One can use transcoding process not only focusing on the language but also on the cultural transposition. Thus, he can either contemplate on the reader of the target text or source text. Moreover, he can develop his own adaptation.Item Pronunciation Problems in French: A Case Study of First Year Students at University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka(Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2015) Gunawardena, C.The present research, a case study, analyzes pronunciation problems encountered by First year students of French at University of Kelaniya. The study is based on the assumption that the pronunciation errors were systematic and did not occur randomly and they reflect the interference of the different prosodic patterns of the learners‘ native language. Data were collected at three occasions when the present researcher worked as a lecturer in 2012. First, following the contrastive analysis hypothesis, potential pronunciation difficulties were identified and then the contrastive analysis hypothesis was validated by the error analysis. The informants used for this study were 20 undergraduates who were at the time of the study studying French as a foreign langue in the first year at University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. They were chosen using random sampling method. All participants had a homogenous linguistic background. All subjects had completed their secondary education in Sinhala medium and during which they had also learnt French. A battery operated audio tape recorder and a 120-minute blank cassettes were used for recording. A list comprised of 150 words representing all French phonemes was used to diagnose pronunciation difficulties. The recording was conducted individually in the faculty language lab and each recording approximately took ten/fifteen minutes. After the completion of recording, the recordings were replayed to identify common errors which were immediately transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet. The errors were classified into four categories; developmental errors, interference errors, fossilized errors and unique errors. The findings revealed that the majority of the errors were interference errors related to French vowels and initial clusters. The fundamental errors showed that similarities between languages do not always facilitate the language acquisition. The findings of the research will be important to teachers, students, curriculum designers, policy makers and other fellow researchers in Sri Lanka.