Translating Politeness Across Cultures: Case of Hindi and English

Abstract

In this paper, we present a corpus based study of politeness across two languages-English and Hindi. It studies the politeness in a translated parallel corpus of Hindi and English and sees how politeness in a Hindi text is translated into English. We provide a detailed theoretical background in which the comparison is carried out, followed by a brief description of the translated data within this theoretical model. Since politeness may become one of the major reasons of conflict and misunderstanding, it is a very important phenomenon to be studied and understood cross-culturally, particularly for such purposes as machine translation.