(Re)Wording War: Re-narration of a positive Sri Lanka in the 61st Independence Day Speech by President Mahinda Rajapaksa

In the field of politics, translation inherently connects with activism. When a government translates itself for local and international audiences, translation becomes an act of re-narration aimed to reconfigure a reality desired by the country. Taking Sinhala as the Source Language, and English as the Target language, this research uses the narrative theory of translation as re-narration to analyze the President’s address to the nation at the 61^st Independence Day Celebrations of Sri Lanka in 2009. Both the inter-lingual translation from Sinhala to English, and the inter-semiotic translation from spoken to printed text are analyzed. The context of Sri Lanka in 2009 is critical in terms of the ‘victory’ for the Sri Lankan forces in the fight against the LTTE, as well as the international attention for the war and the allegations made against human rights violations by the army. It can be argued that then President Mahinda Rajapaksa uses the Independence Day Celebrations as a platform to narrate a positive image of Sri Lanka by referring to the humanitarian aspect of the war and the governmental forces. The findings imply how activism via translation operates from administrative levels to outside (i.e., those who are not involved in administrative work), how certain ideas are omitted, added, and at times deliberately mistranslated to manipulate a positive reconfiguration of Sri Lanka, and how communicative equivalence may render certain nuanced use of language untranslatable. Further, it shows the lapses that occur in inter-semiotic translation, especially when a speech is accompanied by supporting oratory, visual elements.