Which writer is most famously associated, through remarks made in 1827, with the idea of Weltliteratur — that national literatures would increasingly give way to a shared literature of humankind?

David Damrosch, in What Is World Literature?

René Wellek, in The Crisis of Comparative Literature

Pascale Casanova, in The World Republic of Letters

A comparatist insists that the discipline must trace demonstrable historical contacts and influences between literatures — the actual passage of a work from one to another — and distrusts comparing texts that never touched. This methodological position is characteristic of which school?

The French school of comparative literature

The American school, which also admits parallel and interdisciplinary comparison of works that never met

The Russian Formalists, who focused on literariness and device

The Chicago neo-Aristotelian critics

In Eugene Nida's terms, a translation that aims to produce in its readers an effect equivalent to the effect of the original on its first readers, rather than matching the source word for word, exemplifies:

Intralingual translation, a rewording within a single language

Formal equivalence, which stays as close as possible to the form and words of the source

Foreignization, which keeps the source text's strangeness on the surface

Lawrence Venuti criticises the fluent, 'invisible' translation that reads as if originally written in the target language. What alternative does he advocate, and why?

A foreignizing translation that preserves the strangeness of the source and makes the translator's work visible

Strict formal equivalence, in which each individual word and grammatical structure of the source text is matched one-to-one in the target language

Translation only by the original author, to guarantee fidelity

Abandoning translation in favour of reading only in the original language

A foreignizing translation that preserves the strangeness of the source and makes the translator's work visible

According to skopos theory (Vermeer and Reiss), the method chosen for a translation should be determined chiefly by:

The purpose the translation is to serve in its target context

The grammatical rules of the source language alone

The personal taste of the original author

The requirement that every translation be as literal as possible

A.K. Ramanujan is celebrated for bringing classical Tamil Sangam poetry and medieval Kannada vacanas into English. Which of the following is also his translation?

Tagore's Gitanjali, rendered into English

Mahasweta Devi's Bengali fiction

In the late eighteenth century, William Jones's English translation of Kalidasa's Sanskrit play Abhijnanashakuntalam had which notable effect in Europe?

It was admired by writers such as Goethe and Herder and fed European Orientalist interest in India

It was almost completely ignored across Europe and attracted essentially no readership anywhere outside the Indian subcontinent

It ended all European interest in Indian literature for a century

It was the first novel written in English in India

The term 'intertextuality', for the idea that every text is woven out of other texts rather than springing wholly from one author, was coined by:

Gérard Genette, who mapped transtextual relations

Roland Barthes, author of 'The Death of the Author'

Harold Bloom, author of The Anxiety of Influence

In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon argues that a film or stage version of a novel should be evaluated chiefly:

As a creative reinterpretation in its own right, not solely by its fidelity to the source

By how faithfully and completely it reproduces every single incident and detail of the original source text

By whether it is shorter than the original

As a creative reinterpretation in its own right, not solely by its fidelity to the source

By the commercial success of the original novel

A central concern in the politics of translation is that the global flow of translation is uneven: far more books are translated out of English and a few dominant languages than into them. What does this imbalance tend to produce?

A skewed world-literary visibility in which works in or translated into major languages circulate while many others remain unread

Perfect equivalence of visibility among all the world's literatures

The complete and permanent disappearance of every national literature across the world once a few dominant languages come to control translation flows

The end of multilingual writing everywhere

A skewed world-literary visibility in which works in or translated into major languages circulate while many others remain unread

Which of the following are theoretical frameworks or concepts used in comparative and world literary study?

Intertextuality, the idea that texts are made from other texts

Adaptation studies, the analysis of how works are reworked across media

Cosmopolitanism, thinking of oneself as belonging to a wider human community

Intertextuality, the idea that texts are made from other texts

Adaptation studies, the analysis of how works are reworked across media

Cosmopolitanism, thinking of oneself as belonging to a wider human community

The Gauss-Markov theorem of linear regression

Which of the following statements about translation studies are correct?

Dynamic equivalence aims to reproduce the source's effect on the reader rather than its exact form

The cultural turn treats translation as a rewriting shaped by culture and power, not a neutral transfer

A foreignizing translation deliberately keeps the strangeness of the source text

Untranslatability means that no text whatever can ever be translated

Dynamic equivalence aims to reproduce the source's effect on the reader rather than its exact form

The cultural turn treats translation as a rewriting shaped by culture and power, not a neutral transfer

A foreignizing translation deliberately keeps the strangeness of the source text

Which of the following are works or authors of Indian or Global South literature widely read in English translation?

U.R. Ananthamurthy's Samskara, translated by A.K. Ramanujan

Mahasweta Devi's fiction, translated by Gayatri Spivak

Premchand's Hindi and Urdu fiction

U.R. Ananthamurthy's Samskara, translated by A.K. Ramanujan

Mahasweta Devi's fiction, translated by Gayatri Spivak

Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

Premchand's Hindi and Urdu fiction

Which of the following correctly describe world literature or cross-cultural exchange as theorised by comparatists?

Goethe's Weltliteratur envisaged a literature shared beyond national borders

David Damrosch defines world literature as writing that circulates beyond its culture of origin

Cross-cultural exchange can introduce new genres and forms into a receiving tradition

Goethe's Weltliteratur envisaged a literature shared beyond national borders

Comparative literature studies only works written in one and the same language

David Damrosch defines world literature as writing that circulates beyond its culture of origin

Cross-cultural exchange can introduce new genres and forms into a receiving tradition

In Charles Ferguson's original sense of the term, 'diglossia' describes a speech community in which:

a 'high' variety for formal and literary use and a 'low' variety for everyday speech coexist, each with its own functions

a speaker moves between two languages within a single conversation, or even a single sentence, mixing their words freely

a simplified contact language arises out of several mother tongues so that traders and labourers can understand one another

a 'high' variety for formal and literary use and a 'low' variety for everyday speech coexist, each with its own functions

every member of the community learns two unrelated languages from birth and is equally fluent in both of them

Comparative and World Literatures in English Translation

This chapter answers Section XH2.3 of the Humanities and Social Sciences (XH) paper, 'Comparative and World Literatures in English Translation': literatures read in English translation, especially from India and the Global South; cross-cultural exchanges and their impact on literary traditions; the theoretical frameworks of comparative literature — intertextuality, adaptation, interconnectedness and cosmopolitanism; and multilingualism, translation studies and the politics of language in literary production. XH2 English is one of the six optional sections of the paper, chosen at the time of application. The chapter sets out how literatures are compared across languages, how translation carries them, and how power shapes which texts travel.

1. Comparative literature: scope and schools

Comparative literature studies literature across the boundaries of language, nation and even discipline. Its modern development produced two broad approaches. The French school (Van Tieghem, Carré, Guyard) studied demonstrable historical contacts — sources, influences, the actual passage of a work from one literature to another, the rapport de fait. The American school, after René Wellek's 'The Crisis of Comparative Literature' (1958), widened the field to include parallel study of works that never touched and the comparison of literature with the other arts and with ideas.

Alongside comparison sits world literature. Goethe popularised the word Weltliteratur in 1827 (he was not its first user), foreseeing an age in which national literatures would give way to a shared literature of humankind. The idea was revived in our century by David Damrosch, for whom world literature is writing that circulates beyond its culture of origin, by Pascale Casanova's account of a competitive 'world republic of letters', and by Franco Moretti's 'distant reading' of literature at the scale of the whole system. Critics also warn that 'world literature' can privilege what is already translated into dominant languages.

⚠️ Comparative is not the same as world literature

Comparative literature is a method — reading two or more literatures together across a boundary. World literature is a body of texts and a mode of circulation — works that travel beyond their origin, usually through translation. The two overlap but are not identical: one names an activity, the other names what is read.

2. Translation studies

Translation is the channel through which world literature flows, and translation studies asks how, and with what losses and gains, a text crosses languages. Roman Jakobson distinguished three kinds of translation: intralingual (rewording within one language), interlingual (between two languages, the usual sense) and intersemiotic (between sign systems, as a novel becomes a film). Eugene Nida then contrasted formal equivalence, which keeps close to the words and structure of the source, with dynamic (functional) equivalence, which aims to produce in the target reader an effect equivalent to the original's effect on its first readers.

Domestication vs foreignization (Lawrence Venuti): a domesticating translation reads fluently, as if written in the target language, and so hides the translator's invisibility; a foreignizing one keeps the strangeness of the source and signals the translator's presence. Venuti favours the second as more honest about difference.
Skopos theory (Hans Vermeer, with Katharina Reiss): the method of a translation should be decided above all by its skopos, the purpose it is to serve in the target context — a legal contract and a children's poem call for different strategies.
The cultural turn (Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere): translation is not a neutral transfer but a rewriting shaped by the receiving culture's norms, patronage and power; translation can introduce, censor or reshape a foreign text.

🎯 Why fluency can mislead

A smooth, fluent translation feels like a faithful one, but Venuti's point is that its very smoothness erases the foreignness of the original and the labour of the translator. 'Untranslatability' names the residue that resists any crossing — a pun, a metre, a culturally loaded word — not a claim that nothing can be translated at all.

3. Indian and Global South literatures in English translation

India's literature is written in many languages, and English translation is how much of it reaches readers across the country and the world. Rabindranath Tagore reached a global audience, and the 1913 Nobel Prize, largely through his own English rendering of Gitanjali — a famous act of self-translation. A.K. Ramanujan brought classical Tamil Sangam poetry and the medieval Kannada vacanas into luminous English, and translated U.R. Ananthamurthy's Kannada novel Samskara. Gayatri Spivak, who wrote 'The Politics of Translation', translated the Bengali fiction of Mahasweta Devi.

Translation also carries writing that challenges the mainstream. Dalit autobiography and fiction, first written in Marathi, Tamil, Kannada and other languages, now reach a wide readership in English and have reshaped what Indian literature is taken to include. Beyond India, English translation is how much Global South writing — African, Latin American, West Asian — enters the world market, and this raises the question of who selects what is translated, and for whom.

Translation also decides which writers become visible. The International Booker Prize, awarded for a work of fiction translated into English, shares its prize between author and translator, which publicly credits the translator's labour. In 2022 it went to Geetanjali Shree's Hindi novel Ret Samadhi, translated by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand. Elsewhere, Gregory Rabassa's English version of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude carried Latin American fiction, and its magic realism, to a world readership. In each case the English text is what most readers meet, so the translator's choices shape how the original is received.

ℹ️ Self-translation

When authors translate their own work — Tagore from Bengali, or Samuel Beckett between French and English — they can rewrite freely, so the 'translation' may differ from the original by the author's own choice. Self-translation blurs the line between translator and author and between source and target text.

4. Cross-cultural exchanges and their impact

Forms and genres travel, and traditions change when they arrive. The novel, European in its modern form, spread across the world and was remade in each literature it entered. The ghazal, a Persian and Urdu form, has been written in English by poets who keep its couplet-and-refrain structure. Magic realism, shaped in Latin American fiction, circulated into Indian English, African and other novels. Such borrowing is not mere imitation: a received form is bent to new material and so becomes something new.

Exchange has long run in both directions. In the late eighteenth century William Jones and the Asiatic Society translated Sanskrit classics into European languages; his version of Kalidasa's *Abhijnanashakuntalam* was read with wonder, through Georg Forster's German rendering of it, by Goethe and Herder and fed European Romantic and Orientalist interest in India. But such exchange is rarely equal: it travelled inside the structures of empire, and the way a foreign literature is received — what is praised, what is ignored — shapes which works enter the global canon.

ℹ️ Travelling forms are changed on arrival

When a form crosses a culture it is rarely copied unchanged. The European novel became, in India, a vehicle for caste, family and nation; the ghazal in English keeps the couplet but often loosens the strict rhyme; magic realism, holding history and myth together, suited writers telling the story of a decolonising nation. The useful question is always what the receiving tradition does with what it borrows, not whether the borrowing is 'pure'.

5. Theoretical frameworks: intertextuality, adaptation, cosmopolitanism

Intertextuality is the idea that every text is woven out of other texts — quotations, echoes, conventions — rather than springing from a single author's mind. Julia Kristeva coined the term, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's sense of language as dialogic; Roland Barthes declared the text 'a tissue of quotations'; and Gérard Genette, in Palimpsests (1982), mapped the wider family of such relations as transtextuality, which includes hypertextuality, in which a later text (the hypertext) is written over an earlier one (the hypotext).

Adaptation reworks a text across works and media — a novel into a film, a myth into a play. Linda Hutcheon, in A Theory of Adaptation, argues that an adaptation should be judged as a creative reinterpretation in its own right, not merely by its fidelity to the source, and that adaptation is both a process and a product with its own pleasures of repetition and variation. Cosmopolitanism, as developed by Kwame Anthony Appiah, is the ethical stance of belonging to a single human community while respecting difference — a useful frame for a literature that crosses cultures and asks how we read across them.

6. Multilingualism and the politics of language

Much of the world's literature is multilingual at its root. Writers move between tongues; characters code-switch; and in a situation of diglossia (as Charles Ferguson defined it) a 'high' literary variety coexists with an everyday 'low' one. Sheldon Pollock contrasts the cosmopolitan language of wide translocal reach with the vernacular rooted in a particular place, and traces how, in South Asia, vernacular literatures rose beside an older cosmopolitan order of Sanskrit.

Language is never neutral. The politics of language asks who gets to write, in which tongue, and for whom. The African debate frames it sharply: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o rejected English for his mother tongue Gikuyu, while Chinua Achebe chose to reshape English to carry African experience. And the global flow of translation is uneven — far more is translated out of English and a few dominant languages than into them, so that English acts as both a gateway to world visibility and a gatekeeper deciding which literatures are seen.

⚠️ Two answers to the same question

Ngũgĩ and Achebe answer the same question — in what language should the formerly colonised write? — in opposite ways, and both answers are defensible. In an exam, attach the position to the right name: Ngũgĩ abandons the coloniser's language, Achebe appropriates and remakes it.

Key takeaways

Comparative literature reads across languages, nations and disciplines: the French school studies real contacts and influence (rapport de fait), the American school (after Wellek) admits parallel and interdisciplinary study. World literature, from Goethe's Weltliteratur to Damrosch, Casanova and Moretti, is writing that circulates beyond its culture of origin.
Translation studies: Jakobson's intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic kinds; Nida's formal vs dynamic equivalence; Venuti's domestication vs foreignization and the translator's invisibility; Vermeer's skopos (purpose); and the cultural turn of Bassnett and Lefevere, which sees translation as rewriting shaped by power.
Indian and Global South writing reaches readers in English translation: Tagore's self-translated Gitanjali, Ramanujan's classical Tamil, Kannada vacanas and Samskara, Spivak's translation of Mahasweta Devi, and Dalit writing. A standing question is who selects what is translated, and for whom.
Forms travel across cultures and are remade — the novel worldwide, the ghazal in English, magic realism from Latin America. Exchange runs both ways (Jones's Shakuntala reached Goethe) but rarely equally, since it moves inside structures of empire and reception shapes the canon.
Key frameworks: intertextuality (Kristeva, Barthes, Genette's transtextuality and hypertextuality), adaptation (Hutcheon, who argues against judging by fidelity alone), and cosmopolitanism (Appiah), a stance of belonging to one human community while respecting difference.
Literature is often multilingual (code-switching, diglossia; Pollock's cosmopolitan vs vernacular). The politics of language asks who writes in which tongue: Ngũgĩ abandons English for Gikuyu while Achebe remakes English, and the uneven flow of translation makes English both a gateway and a gatekeeper.

Practice questions (17)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

Which writer is most famously associated, through remarks made in 1827, with the idea of Weltliteratur — that national literatures would increasingly give way to a shared literature of humankind?
1. David Damrosch, in What Is World Literature?
2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
3. René Wellek, in The Crisis of Comparative Literature
4. Pascale Casanova, in The World Republic of Letters
Show answer
Answer: B — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe popularised the term Weltliteratur in conversation in 1827, foreseeing an age of literature shared beyond nations (earlier German writers had used the word, but his usage made it famous). Damrosch and Casanova are twentieth- and twenty-first-century theorists who revived and reworked the idea, and Wellek wrote about the crisis of comparative method; none of them is the source of the 1827 remarks.
A comparatist insists that the discipline must trace demonstrable historical contacts and influences between literatures — the actual passage of a work from one to another — and distrusts comparing texts that never touched. This methodological position is characteristic of which school?
1. The French school of comparative literature
2. The American school, which also admits parallel and interdisciplinary comparison of works that never met
3. The Russian Formalists, who focused on literariness and device
4. The Chicago neo-Aristotelian critics
Show answer
Answer: A — The French school of comparative literature
Studying real contacts and influence — the rapport de fait — is the hallmark of the French school. The American school, after Wellek, is precisely the one that broadened comparison to works that never met and to other disciplines, so it is the strongest distractor; the Russian Formalists and the Chicago critics are schools of a different kind, not defined by the influence-versus-parallel debate.
In Eugene Nida's terms, a translation that aims to produce in its readers an effect equivalent to the effect of the original on its first readers, rather than matching the source word for word, exemplifies:
1. Intralingual translation, a rewording within a single language
2. Formal equivalence, which stays as close as possible to the form and words of the source
3. Dynamic (functional) equivalence
4. Foreignization, which keeps the source text's strangeness on the surface
Show answer
Answer: C — Dynamic (functional) equivalence
Matching the effect on the reader rather than the surface form is Nida's dynamic (functional) equivalence. Formal equivalence is its opposite, staying close to the words of the source, so it is the tempting contrast; intralingual translation is Jakobson's category for rewording within one language, and foreignization is Venuti's strategy, a different framework altogether.
Lawrence Venuti criticises the fluent, 'invisible' translation that reads as if originally written in the target language. What alternative does he advocate, and why?
1. Strict formal equivalence, in which each individual word and grammatical structure of the source text is matched one-to-one in the target language
2. Translation only by the original author, to guarantee fidelity
3. Abandoning translation in favour of reading only in the original language
4. A foreignizing translation that preserves the strangeness of the source and makes the translator's work visible
Show answer
Answer: D — A foreignizing translation that preserves the strangeness of the source and makes the translator's work visible
Venuti favours foreignizing translation, which keeps the source's difference visible and resists the illusion that the text was always English; this counters the translator's invisibility he criticises. Strict word-for-word formal equivalence is a separate notion (Nida) and not his remedy; restricting translation to the author or abandoning translation altogether are not positions Venuti takes.
According to skopos theory (Vermeer and Reiss), the method chosen for a translation should be determined chiefly by:
1. The purpose the translation is to serve in its target context
2. The grammatical rules of the source language alone
3. The personal taste of the original author
4. The requirement that every translation be as literal as possible
Show answer
Answer: A — The purpose the translation is to serve in its target context
Skopos (Greek for 'purpose') theory holds that the aim the translation must fulfil in the target situation governs the strategy, so a contract and a children's rhyme are translated differently. It explicitly rejects the idea that source grammar alone, or a blanket demand for literalness, should decide; and the author's taste is not the criterion.
Rabindranath Tagore reached a global readership and the 1913 Nobel Prize largely through his own English rendering of which work?
1. Samskara
2. Godaan
3. Gitanjali
4. Midnight's Children
Show answer
Answer: C — Gitanjali
Tagore's own English Gitanjali (Song Offerings) carried his work to the West and to the Nobel Prize, a famous case of self-translation. Samskara is U.R. Ananthamurthy's Kannada novel (translated by Ramanujan), Godaan is Premchand's Hindi novel, and Midnight's Children is Rushdie's English novel; none of these is Tagore's self-translated book.
A.K. Ramanujan is celebrated for bringing classical Tamil Sangam poetry and medieval Kannada vacanas into English. Which of the following is also his translation?
1. Tagore's Gitanjali, rendered into English
2. U.R. Ananthamurthy's Kannada novel Samskara
3. Mahasweta Devi's Bengali fiction
4. Premchand's Hindi novel Godaan
Show answer
Answer: B — U.R. Ananthamurthy's Kannada novel Samskara
Ramanujan translated U.R. Ananthamurthy's Samskara from Kannada into English. Gitanjali was self-translated by Tagore, Mahasweta Devi's fiction was translated by Gayatri Spivak, and Godaan is Premchand's; attributing any of those to Ramanujan is the error the question tests.
Which theorist is known both for the essay 'The Politics of Translation' and for translating the fiction of Mahasweta Devi into English?
1. Susan Bassnett
2. Linda Hutcheon
3. Julia Kristeva
4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Show answer
Answer: D — Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Gayatri Spivak wrote 'The Politics of Translation' and translated Mahasweta Devi's Bengali stories into English. Bassnett is a major translation theorist but not Devi's translator, Hutcheon is the theorist of adaptation, and Kristeva coined intertextuality; none combines the essay and the Mahasweta Devi translations as Spivak does.
In the late eighteenth century, William Jones's English translation of Kalidasa's Sanskrit play Abhijnanashakuntalam had which notable effect in Europe?
1. It was admired by writers such as Goethe and Herder and fed European Orientalist interest in India
2. It was almost completely ignored across Europe and attracted essentially no readership anywhere outside the Indian subcontinent
3. It ended all European interest in Indian literature for a century
4. It was the first novel written in English in India
Show answer
Answer: A — It was admired by writers such as Goethe and Herder and fed European Orientalist interest in India
Jones's Shakuntala was widely admired in Europe — Goethe praised it — and helped shape Romantic and Orientalist fascination with India, a clear case of cross-cultural exchange through translation. The claims that it was ignored, that it killed European interest, or that it was a novel are all false: it was a translation of a classical Sanskrit play, not an original English novel.
The term 'intertextuality', for the idea that every text is woven out of other texts rather than springing wholly from one author, was coined by:
1. Gérard Genette, who mapped transtextual relations
2. Julia Kristeva
3. Roland Barthes, author of 'The Death of the Author'
4. Harold Bloom, author of The Anxiety of Influence
Show answer
Answer: B — Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva coined 'intertextuality' in the 1960s, developing Bakhtin's idea of dialogic language. Barthes elaborated the idea and Genette systematised related relations as transtextuality, so both are closely linked but did not coin the term; Bloom's 'anxiety of influence' is a different, author-centred account of literary relation.
In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon argues that a film or stage version of a novel should be evaluated chiefly:
1. By how faithfully and completely it reproduces every single incident and detail of the original source text
2. By whether it is shorter than the original
3. As a creative reinterpretation in its own right, not solely by its fidelity to the source
4. By the commercial success of the original novel
Show answer
Answer: C — As a creative reinterpretation in its own right, not solely by its fidelity to the source
Hutcheon treats adaptation as a creative work to be judged on its own terms, and explicitly argues against making fidelity to the source the measure of its value. Strict fidelity is precisely the criterion she rejects, so it is the tempting opposite; length and the source's commercial success are not her criteria at all.
A central concern in the politics of translation is that the global flow of translation is uneven: far more books are translated out of English and a few dominant languages than into them. What does this imbalance tend to produce?
1. Perfect equivalence of visibility among all the world's literatures
2. The complete and permanent disappearance of every national literature across the world once a few dominant languages come to control translation flows
3. The end of multilingual writing everywhere
4. A skewed world-literary visibility in which works in or translated into major languages circulate while many others remain unread
Show answer
Answer: D — A skewed world-literary visibility in which works in or translated into major languages circulate while many others remain unread
The uneven flow skews visibility: literatures tied to dominant languages travel, while others struggle to be seen, so translation acts as both gateway and gatekeeper. It does not create perfect equivalence (the opposite of the point), nor does it make national literatures or multilingual writing disappear — those overstate and misstate the consequence.
Which of the following are theoretical frameworks or concepts used in comparative and world literary study?
1. Intertextuality, the idea that texts are made from other texts
2. Adaptation studies, the analysis of how works are reworked across media
3. Cosmopolitanism, thinking of oneself as belonging to a wider human community
4. The Gauss-Markov theorem of linear regression
Show answer
Answer: A — Intertextuality, the idea that texts are made from other texts; B — Adaptation studies, the analysis of how works are reworked across media; C — Cosmopolitanism, thinking of oneself as belonging to a wider human community
Intertextuality, adaptation studies and cosmopolitanism are all frameworks used in comparative and world literature. The Gauss-Markov theorem belongs to statistics and econometrics, not to literary study, so it is the one that does not belong.
Which of the following statements about translation studies are correct?
1. Untranslatability means that no text whatever can ever be translated
2. Dynamic equivalence aims to reproduce the source's effect on the reader rather than its exact form
3. The cultural turn treats translation as a rewriting shaped by culture and power, not a neutral transfer
4. A foreignizing translation deliberately keeps the strangeness of the source text
Show answer
Answer: B — Dynamic equivalence aims to reproduce the source's effect on the reader rather than its exact form; C — The cultural turn treats translation as a rewriting shaped by culture and power, not a neutral transfer; D — A foreignizing translation deliberately keeps the strangeness of the source text
Dynamic equivalence (Nida), the cultural turn (Bassnett and Lefevere) and foreignization (Venuti) are all correctly described. The claim that untranslatability means no text can ever be translated misreads the concept: untranslatability names the residue that resists any one crossing — a pun, a metre, a culture-bound word — not a claim that translation is impossible, so that claim is the false one.
Which of the following are works or authors of Indian or Global South literature widely read in English translation?
1. U.R. Ananthamurthy's Samskara, translated by A.K. Ramanujan
2. Mahasweta Devi's fiction, translated by Gayatri Spivak
3. Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
4. Premchand's Hindi and Urdu fiction
Show answer
Answer: A — U.R. Ananthamurthy's Samskara, translated by A.K. Ramanujan; B — Mahasweta Devi's fiction, translated by Gayatri Spivak; D — Premchand's Hindi and Urdu fiction
Samskara (translated by Ramanujan), Mahasweta Devi's fiction (translated by Spivak) and Premchand's work are all Indian literature read widely in English translation. The Canterbury Tales is a medieval English work, not a text from India or the Global South in translation, so it is the one that does not belong.
Which of the following correctly describe world literature or cross-cultural exchange as theorised by comparatists?
1. Goethe's Weltliteratur envisaged a literature shared beyond national borders
2. Comparative literature studies only works written in one and the same language
3. David Damrosch defines world literature as writing that circulates beyond its culture of origin
4. Cross-cultural exchange can introduce new genres and forms into a receiving tradition
Show answer
Answer: A — Goethe's Weltliteratur envisaged a literature shared beyond national borders; C — David Damrosch defines world literature as writing that circulates beyond its culture of origin; D — Cross-cultural exchange can introduce new genres and forms into a receiving tradition
Goethe's Weltliteratur, Damrosch's definition by circulation, and the entry of new forms through exchange are all correct. The claim that comparative literature studies only works in a single language is false by definition: it compares across languages and boundaries, so that is the statement that does not hold.
In Charles Ferguson's original sense of the term, 'diglossia' describes a speech community in which:
1. a speaker moves between two languages within a single conversation, or even a single sentence, mixing their words freely
2. a simplified contact language arises out of several mother tongues so that traders and labourers can understand one another
3. a 'high' variety for formal and literary use and a 'low' variety for everyday speech coexist, each with its own functions
4. every member of the community learns two unrelated languages from birth and is equally fluent in both of them
Show answer
Answer: C — a 'high' variety for formal and literary use and a 'low' variety for everyday speech coexist, each with its own functions
In Ferguson's account diglossia is the stable coexistence of two varieties of a language with a functional division: a prestigious 'high' variety (literary, formal, learned in school) and a 'low' variety of daily speech, as with classical and colloquial Arabic among his examples. Moving between two languages inside one conversation is code-switching, which is the tempting confusion; a pidgin is a simplified contact language; and balanced fluency in two unrelated languages is a different phenomenon from the high/low division that defines diglossia.