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constructing pathways to translation - Higher Education Commission

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Languages differ considerably in the extent <strong>to</strong> which participant and process<br />

relationships are actually realized in their syntax, and this constitutes a substantial<br />

problem for <strong>translation</strong>. It has been noted that in English, be can be used <strong>to</strong> express all<br />

these set of relationship, although there is quite a range of alternatives available in<br />

English which fulfill similar functions, equatives such as equal, represent, stand for,<br />

attributives such as get, look, seem, sound, term.<br />

Transitivity in Urdu is of different. Urdu uses forms of hona (e.g., hai) in the relational<br />

processes in a way which closely parallels the English usage of ‘be’.<br />

1a. Intensive Identifying, for both (i) class membership:<br />

i. Sher janwar Hai: The tiger is an animal.<br />

ii. Wo sher hai: That is a tiger.<br />

1b. Intensive Attributive:<br />

Sher bemar hai: The tiger is sick.<br />

2a. Circumstantial Identifying:<br />

Wahan sher hai: There is a tiger.<br />

2b. Circumstantial Attributive:<br />

Sher Bengal me hai: There is a tiger/there are tigers in Bengal.<br />

3a. Possessive identifying:<br />

Pag sher ki hai: The track is a tiger’s.<br />

3b. Possessive attributive:<br />

Sher ki dharian hai: The tiger has stripes/ tigers have stripes.<br />

And the existential; sher hai: The tiger exists.<br />

Further, Urdu makes a distinction between permanent and transi<strong>to</strong>ry attributes, by adding<br />

hota in the first case, but using hona, alone, in the second.<br />

i. Sher jangli hota hai: The tiger is fierce/wild.<br />

Tigers are fierce/wild.<br />

ii. Sher boohra hai: The tiger is old (Bell, 1991 : 132).<br />

Between Urdu and English, there seems <strong>to</strong> be a degree of fuzziness between the<br />

universality of the processes, particularly circumstantial and possessive; but the fuzziness<br />

is more apparent than real, and a function of language- specific syntactic and lexical<br />

choice is basically a selection from the Mood Systems – rather than a flaw in that notion<br />

of the universal proposition. The product of choices made in the system of Transitivity,<br />

69

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