TRANSLATION, TEXT AND THEORY: THE PARADIGM OF INDIA Edited By Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Sage, Rs 540 Translation, basically a linguistic act of conversion, has long outgrown its literal connotation to incorporate various other resonances. Postmodern thinking has quashed the traditional notion of translation as an unobtrusive transfer of idiolects and 'phrase regimens' from the source to the target language. Translation has gradually become a device of connecting cultures, of discovering secret niches of power within a culture and more important, of defamiliarizing and contextualizing a text nourished within a specific culture at a given point of time. A translated text is thus, by no means, a mimetic reproduction of the original, but a re-appropriated and re-validated version of it which guarantees, as Walter Benjamin would have us believe, its Uberleben (afterlife). In the multilingual and pluralistic perspective of India, translation forms that part of the postcolonial dynamics which has strong bearings on the politics of representation. This, in turn, informs the construction of a postcolonial subjectivity. When Jhumpa Lahiri says, 'I translate, therefore I am', 'translation' becomes synonymous with the exploration of the author's angst as a postcolonial subject as she negotiating several layers of reality. A translator cannot escape a sense of aporia. The nature of his dilemma is both qualitative and quantitative. What to translate and what to leave out or unaltered? How and how much to translate? Why translate at all? What exactly is a translator's role? A disseminator-cum-mediator of cultures, an arbiter of idiomatic quarrels between two languages, an author without authority, an inquisitive critic of the original text or simply a linguistic agent with a sophisticated information processing system? Translation, Text and Theory approaches five fundamental questions raised by translation studies in India. These concern the how, when, where, what and why of the act of translation. These are discussed under the following rubrics: 'Cultural Attitudes', 'Historical Perspectives', 'Pragmatic Considerations', 'Linguistic Descriptions', 'Philosophical Foundations'. Among the contributors, Sujit Mukherjee insists on the translator's need to devise his own methodology, while Samantak Das deals with the sociology of translation, defining translation as a means of resistance against Western orientalism and pointing out alternate phases of 'domesticating' and 'foreignizing' texts in the history of translation of Bengali literature. Lachman M. Khubchandani views translation as a cultural filter and Tejaswini Niranjana considers subsequent translations of the same text to disrupt the false notion of historical continuity. Chapters two to five unravel various facets of translation studies, with emphasis on its interdisciplinary nature. Several theories that are doing the rounds in the academic circles are taken up for discussion. The editor, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, contributes the last essay of the volume, describing 'the felicity conditions' for the speech act of translation in graphic detail. The book assembles a host of postcolonial theories on translation which are constantly shaping and reshaping what Nair calls 'the paradigm of India'. The image that emerges of the postcolonial translator is of someone struggling with an intractable text-material of foreign or native origin. This finally becomes symbolic, even symptomatic, of the translator's attempt at resolving the paradoxes within his own identity.