Advances in Consumer Research
Issue 9 ( Special Issue CPIMASS) : 240-252 doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22042641
Original Article
From Text to Context: Translation and the Global Rearticulation of Social Justice in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and La Déesse et le Marchand
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1
Assistant Professor,Amity School Of Foreign Languages,Amity University Jharkhand
2
Associate Professor,Amity School Of Foreign Languages,Amity University Jharkhand
3
Assistant Professor,Amity Institute of English and Research Studies,Amity University Jharkhand
4
Assistant Professor, Centre for French and Francophone Studies, JNU, New Delhi
Abstract

This article examines Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) and its French translation La Déesse et le Marchand (2023), translated by Myriam Bellehigue, to investigate how translation functions as a critical site of cultural mediation in the global circulation of social justice narratives. Drawing on postcolonial feminist theory, subaltern studies, and contemporary translation studies, the paper employs a qualitative comparative textual analysis to explore how key themes female agency, caste hierarchy, ecological displacement, and colonial power are articulated in the English original and reinterpreted in the French translation. The study argues that translation is not a neutral act of linguistic transfer but an ideological process that reshapes meanings across cultural contexts. Through close analysis of lexical choices, register shifts, and structural transformations, the paper demonstrates that while the French translation preserves the core concerns of the source text, it introduces subtle yet significant interpretive shifts. These include the amplification of mythic feminine agency through title transformation, the recontextualisation of caste and class within a European sociolinguistic framework, and the modulation of critique related to global capitalism and migration. The shift from Gun Island to La Déesse et le Marchand is particularly significant, as it reorients the narrative from a linguistic and postcolonial mystery toward a relational and symbolic framework centered on feminine mediation. Ultimately, the article contributes to translation studies by showing how translation actively participates in the reconfiguration of postcolonial discourse, producing new meanings of gender equity and social justice in transnational literary contexts.

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