International Translation Day 2024: Fractured or not, the world will always need good translators, says Lalit Kumar
Every year, September 30 is observed as the International Translation Day. “International Translation Day, annually on September 30th, serves as a global celebration dedicated to recognizing the invaluable contributions of translators and interpreters in bridging linguistic and cultural divides,” according to the UNESCO.
Since the dawn of humanity, humans have spoken in different dialects, languages and sprachbunds and dialect continuums. The main purpose though has remained the same: to communicate and get one’s message across.
“Established by the United Nations in 2017, International Translation Day serves as a tribute to the tireless efforts of translators and interpreters in promoting dialogue, peace, and mutual understanding among individuals from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds,” according to UNESCO.
Lalit Kumar teaches English at Deendayal Upadhyaya College, University of Delhi. At present, he is a Fellow at the Prime Ministers Museum and Library, Teen Murti House, New Delhi. He has won the Kalinga Literary Festival (KLF) Book Award 2022 and Valley of Words (VoW) Book Award 2023, for his English translation of Harimohan Jha’s classic Maithili novel Kanyadan.
Down To Earth caught up with Kumar on the occasion of International Translation Day and quizzed him about the importance of the process from ancient times to the present day. Excerpts:
Q. The Panchatantra is one of India’s best-known contributions to world literature. How did the Panchatantra spread from the Indian Subcontinent to the Middle East and from there to Europe and what role did translators play in the process?
A. The story of the circulation of Vishnu Sharma’s Panchatantra in ancient times is as compelling as the fables it contains. In the sixth-century AD, so the story goes, Khusro, the emperor of ancient Persia, heard about a magical herb which could bring the dead back to life. His wise and trusted ministers informed him that the herb was found only in India. Obsessed with becoming immortal, the emperor sent his trusted physician Burzoe to India. The physician explored the length and breadth of the country but did not manage to find the herb. At long last, he came across a wise sage, who told him that the elixir of life he was looking for was neither a plant nor potion. It was, in fact, a book called the Panchatantra, a rich repository of knowledge and hence a source of immortality. The sage equated foolishness with death and knowledge with immortality. Burzoe brought a copy of the Panchatantra to Iran, where it was translated into the Pahlavi language as Kalileh and Dimneh. The Persian version was named after Damanaka and Karataka — two conniving jackals in Vishnu Sharma’s text.
Incidentally, during his maiden visit to Iran in 2016, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi released a manuscript copy of Kalileh and Dimneh to commemorate the ancient cultural ties between the two countries. The sixth-century translation of the Indian text turned out to be immensely popular in Persia. Subsequently, Persian princes were taught the Panchatantra for its ability to convey the complex lessons of statecraft and good governance through stories. The Pahlavi edition was thereupon translated into Arabic and from Arabic into Hebrew, from Hebrew into Latin, from Latin into Italian, and from Italian into English. Sir Thomas North, a British judge and translator, introduced the stories of the Panchatantra to the English-speaking world in 1570. It was published as The Morall Philosophie of Doni, named after the Italian translator. Thus, the English translation of a classical Indian text was carried out much before William Jones and Charles Wilkins translated several Sanskrit texts into English in the 1790s. Boccaccio, the great Italian story-teller and writer of Decameron, in all likelihood, was familiar with both the Latin and the Italian translation of Vishnu Sharma’s work. There are structural and thematic similarities between his Decameron and the Indian text, especially in the employment of the literary technique of frame story. The Panchatantra and the Jataka tales are some of the earliest texts to use the device of frame narrative in which several stories emanate from one central story.
Q. Was translation of literary texts a specialised profession in the ancient and medieval periods?
A. The answer is both yes and no because the word translation is a nebulous category with a wide range of meanings. In India, the tenth-century Kannada poet Pampa’s Samasta Bharata, popularly known as Pampa Bharata, was the first translation of the Sanskrit Mahabharata into any modern Indian language. You may call it an adaptation because in his rendering, Draupadi is not married to the five Pandavas but only to Arjun. Unlike other poets, Pampa, a devout Jain, was an army commander of the king Arikesari of the Chalukyan dynasty and had participated in several battles. He was a rare example of a poet-cum-warrior. Like Kamban before him, and Tulsidas, Sarla Das, Chanda Jha, and numerous others after him, he made significant departures from the original Sanskrit texts. All these poets rendered Sanskrit classics into regional languages but we do not celebrate them as translators but poets. In their respective languages, they are even today far more popular than Valmiki or Vyasa. The concept of fidelity to the text was not so important in the ancient world. In all likelihood, it became important after the Bible started getting translated into European languages much against the wishes of the orthodox church.
In other parts of the world, for instance in China, the practice of ‘crowd translation’ in translating Buddhist texts into Chinese was quite intriguing. In the absence of any written source, a monk who had travelled to India and learnt a sutra by heart, recited them phrase by phrase, fragment by fragment before an assembly of a thousand-odd Chinese scholars in an intermediary language that they all could follow. An intense debate followed. Once they agreed on the right interpretation of each fragment, a scribe wrote it down. It was handled with care because each act of translation was a diplomatic act. Wrong interpretations may have led to misunderstanding, conflict, and even wars.
Let me give you another example of the figure of dragoman, Sultan’s translator, in the Ottoman empire. Turkish ruler Sultan Murad III often exchanged letters with the sixteenth century Queen Elizabeth of England. He composed them in Turkish and his official translator rendered them into Italian — a language Elizabeth and her courtiers could follow. Murad was under the impression that he was the most powerful king of the world and, in comparison, Elizabeth was a minor ruler. So, he asked the dragoman to write that the ‘Queen’s subservience and devotion’ had pleased him. The dragoman knew that these words could displease the queen, break the diplomatic ties, and above all, trigger a war. Therefore, he decided to replace the phrase ‘subservience and devotion’ with ‘sincere friendship.’ Like the dragoman, a translator has to remain cautious, play it safe. There are instances where the life of a translator is at risk more than the original author. We know that Deenbandhu Mitra was not arrested for writing the play Nill Darpan but his English translator Reverend James Long was apprehended and sentenced to prison. Salman Rushdie’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death, and Italian translator seriously wounded. So, in some cases, translation may be a specialised practice and in some others it may not.
Q: Is the ability to translate innate or can it be learnt? What are the basic tools of a translator?
A. The same question applies to writing novels, composing poems, or mastering any form of art for that matter. If we are to believe the empiricist philosopher John Locke, nothing is innate. We Indians always translate things consciously or unconsciously. In some parts of India, kids learn the English language through translation, through rendering passages from their mother tongue into English. One can cultivate any skill through regular practice as long as one derives pleasure out of it and translation is no exception. There is no need to pore over numerous books on theories of translation. They will not be of great help. Theory at times kills the joy. Tulsidas or Pampa had no access to translation theory. If you have a good command of the source and the target text and a knack for picking up new words and phrases, you better take the plunge.
Q. Today, when the internet has made the world more ‘democratic’ in terms of access to knowledge, which types of translation would you prefer: the old way of translating literary texts or the one using algorithms or AI?
A. It is true that when a new technology is introduced the age-old question whether the machine will make the man redundant resurfaces. When computers were introduced, similar fears and anxieties were expressed. But nothing of the sort happened. I do not use AI while translating a text but I am not averse to the idea. A machine may do the translation on your behalf, but it will always need human intervention. It is too early to make a judgement but I see no harm in embracing new technologies with a bit of caution. I said caution because recently I read that in some American universities the use of artificial intelligence had to be banned, for teachers used AI to set the questions for assignment, students wrote answers using AI, and teachers once again used AI to evaluate them. If students, teachers, administrators, and everybody else will start using AI, human creativity will not realise its full potential in the long run.
Q. Today’s fractured world needs more translators to build bridges across cultures. Your thoughts?
A. The world needs good story letters, poets, healers, and translators. Since antiquity, like literature, translation has played a key role in bridging the gap among different languages and cultures, in making people empathise with one another. We have a unique repository of precolonial, colonial, as well as modern texts which need to be preserved, archived, and translated. Our focus should be not only on translating fiction, but also knowledge texts, not only on translating into English but also from English and other languages into Indian languages. We must encourage the younger generation to read stories and poems in their mother tongue, to know about their folk tales, literary traditions and songs, and explore the whole gamut of possibilities the local languages provide. Or else we run the risk of being transformed into a largely monolingual nation. Fractured or not, the world always needed translators and so it does now.