Translating the Empire’s Tongue: Linguistic Subversion in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy treats English, the language that embodies a despotic and arbitrary imperial rule, as a site where colonial discourse, functioning as an agent of knowledge production, reveals its authority. Recognizing that such knowledge is deeply bound to the exercise of power over the colonized, Roy, as a postcolonial writer, bends, challenges, and symbolically reconstructs the colonizer’s language. Her linguistic disruptions serve not only as resistance to colonial discipline and power but also as a reaction to the knowledge structures produced by imperialism to legitimize and perpetuate colonial dominance. This study examines the Turkish translation of Roy’s novel in order to determine whether these subversive linguistic strategies are carried over into the target text, and whether the translation reproduces the linguistic plays that unsettle the coherence of the colonial language while dramatizing the instability of colonial authority. Selected excerpts were interpreted through a critical lens, drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework to explore how power relations operate across different linguistic levels. The findings suggest that although the translator successfully renders many of Roy’s hybrid and playful linguistic forms at the textual level, the translation falls short of conveying the broader postcolonial discourse that challenges colonial linguistic authority. Consequently, the macro-level features of Roy’s resistance, those tied to cultural critique and discursive transformation, are only partially realized in the Turkish version.