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Interpreting culture

Seeking a voice: Mini Krishnan, Editor, OUP, inaugurates the seminar ‘Translating India into English.’

Translating India into English’ brings to our minds a host of questions. Why translate? For whom? How can you translate a culture into a new language? Often, the most common answer for the first two is: to reach many readers. It is the last question that raises innumerable anxieties for the author, translator, reader and publisher.

Attempting to project the multiple angles of translation; posing questions on the common pitfalls in a translator’s journey; the fate of a translated text in the hands of a reader and the global market, were academics, translators and editors at a two-day National seminar on ‘Translating India into English,’ organised by the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore, and the Institute of English, University of Kerala.

Mini Krishnan, Editor, Translations for the Oxford University Press, set the tone for the sessions with her inaugural remarks, “Living in a post-colonial society, we are naturally conditioned by Western and monolingual notions of the secondary role of translators, but, in our multi-lingual situation no one can ignore the power and relevance of translation.”

The translator is blamed if the reader is disappointed and if the book does not sell, but is rarely remembered if the translation is fluent. They are often accused of having shorn the original of all finesse. But rarely do we, the readers, ask ourselves what we look for in a translation.

Living in an age when language itself has become the site of ideology and social dynamics, grappling with the success and reach of translations acquires multiple dimensions. Viewed against this, the functioning of the National Translation Mission becomes relevant because it has its role cut out to translate knowledge texts rather than limiting itself to creative writing.

A large number of translations appear in the English language and “right from the moment English is selected as the target language, the intentions of the translator are mapped” stated A. J Thomas of the Sahitya Akademi. This underlined the points raised by many of those who presented papers at the seminar.

If it is the ‘foreignness of text” that confronts the translator according to Jameela Begum, it was translator-academic Alladi Uma who put it succinctly when she explained that there is always a multiplicity of voices and that the “spaces between words,” and the “rhythms of a native language” all acquire importance. A dominant culture could always impact the psyche of an individual and this she said was very evident in Dalit Literature. “Sanitising texts,” “capturing orality” and coming to terms with “problems of intranslatability” were the recurring issues. “If language is a system closely related to the cultural practices of a particular region, translation from one language to another may generate issues of representation,” as wide ranging as gender, class, community and language, remarked P.P Ajayakumar, who chose writer Bama’s ‘Sangati,’ to elaborate upon.

“Homogenised translations are not a must because it is possible to produce English translations that strive hard to retain multiplicities and the unique flavours of Indian language,” was how M. Sridhar from the University of Hyderabad and a translator himself, described the experience.

On familiar ground, K.M. Sherrif, the translator of Basheer’s works addressed the “invisibility of the translator” and explained how the “translator was only acting out the role of the author.”

As Gregory Rabassa, (Marquez’s translator) says, “I say the English is hiding behind the Spanish. That’s what a good translation is: you have to think if Garcia Marquez had been born speaking English, that’s how a translation should sound.”

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