Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Semiotica, 2026 (AHCI, SSCI, Scopus)
This article examines Shumona Sinha’s novel Calcutta from the dual perspectives of translation semiotics and city semiotics. It starts from the notion of watermark translation, whereby a text is published as an original but was actually generated through a translation in the author’s mind, portraying a linguistic, historical, and cultural context rooted in spatial coordinates other than those of the language used. Thus, in the linguistic and cultural context in which it is presented, the text gives the reader the impression of reading a translation. It is therefore a translingual expression representing a foreign space in its singularity. Although Shumona Sinha writes in French, her text reveals distant realities belonging to her country of origin, West Bengal, and more specifically, her hometown of Calcutta. This article analyses the nature of watermark translation in Calcutta and the xenographic reproduction of this metropolis in Sinha’s eponymous novel.