ABSTRACT
Translating a disability text into English in the Indian context invariably involves contending with its intersectionality with issues such as caste, class, gender and language. Translation, therefore, does not merely facilitate a linguistic transfer or re-‘presentation’ of a text into the English language but also becomes a form of activism in which representation becomes the key to placing the text in a wider cultural field. The three Urdu stories translated for this purpose are examined for not just their representation of disability but also for the variety of translation practices that enable the reader to access these texts sensitively. Thus the translator of a disability text can perform any of the following tasks, - act as a collaborator with the author in portraying disability affirmatively. Alternatively, offer a resistant interpretation to a text antagonistic to disability or uncover the silences within a text to provide a subversive reading. Even though both disability and translation are conventionally perceived as suffering from a ‘loss’, they are in fact modes of enablement that renegotiate the boundaries between disability and normativity, the source and translated text. While the representation of disability compels a reassessment of ‘normality,’ the very act of translation unskews the power differential between the target and source language.
