Transporting the Translatable Names of Places Untranslatedly: Stylistic Analysis of Sociolinguistic Codes in Twilight in Dehli and Ice Candy Man

Abstract

This study intends to explore unique patterns of sociolinguistic codes from two famous postcolonial novels, i.e., Twilight in Dehli by Ahmed Ali and Ice Candy Man by Bapsi Sidhwa. This is a qualitative descriptive study that employs Paul Simpsons’ Theory of Narrative Stylistics as a framework. For the purpose of data analysis, three categories of words are formed to illustrate the differences between the words that could be translated, the words which had the possibility of being translated, and the words which could not be translated at all. The results of the study show that both of these postcolonial novels are replete with the words that have possibility for using alternative expressions in English, but the novelists have deliberately used the local words as a tool to manifest their true culture and identity. This study recommends to extend such probe of sociolinguistic codes on other postcolonial literary works to fortify these findings.