When English came to India, it was a huge cultural force, entering with the conquerors as one of the two arms of the empire (the other being evangelism); such a force can wipe out or suppress a part of you, said Mini Krishnan, facilitator at a workshop on Listening and Reading: India in English conducted at The Hindu Lit for Life on Friday. “So what Indians need to do is to keep alive the fantastic bilinguality we have,” she said. “The nimble, complex mind of Indians was often suppressed in the desire to mimic the British, but it was, in reality, a huge strength,” she noted.
Ms. Krishnan is the Translations Editor at the Tamil Nadu Textbook And Educational Services Corporation and previously held the same role at the Oxford University Press.
Delving into why story-telling, writing and re-telling are important, Ms. Krishnan explained that oral literature and folklore were the mainstay for hundreds of years, while printing and reading came much later. The way language comes into being is shaped by culture, which in turn shapes literature. India, she noted, has a rich wealth of languages, with five language families, 14 major writing systems in use, and 400 languages, though only 114 are recognised and only 18 classified as official.
Translators’ tales
One problem that translators face, therefore, is the different registers used in Indian languages. The different ways that people spoke sometimes made them difficult to translate into English because it does not have that many registers. “Translators have to take risks,” she said.
Translators work in different ways, Ms. Krishnan said. For instance, the early translations were usually literal, word-for-word, not making for very interesting reading. However, this is also the way many translators begin work even today, starting with a first draft that is a word-to-word translation which is then revised further.
Some translators prefer to read the book over and over again, while others translate each sentence and then work on it to convey the pace and excitement of the story to the reader, especially in fiction. “The debate continues as to what is more important [for translation]: a grip on the mother tongue or a grip in the target language, in this case, English,” she said.
