Three aspects of translation

(A broadsheet team discussion)

– A Suneetha, M A Moid and R Srivatsan

What do you mean by the idea of  ‘translating worlds’?

Suneetha: When one writes, one is addressing existing debate; one is trying to write in that particular domain, context and discourse. These determine the shape of one’s writing, its content and its tone. On one level, there is the hierarchy between English and regional languages and on the other, each language has its own public sphere related to its own history, context and politics. The debate in each language is characterized by both these factors. To give an example, Urdu debate has a pan-national context which also includes Arabic, Persian and Islamic worlds. Academic debates in English would address multi-national readerships. With a linguistic state and an identity that was established over 50 years, Telugu debates have a profile that responds more to the political debates within the state. There is very little attempt to speak to an audience which is not Telugu speaking. So when we try to translate from English to Telugu or Urdu to Telugu one needs to be aware of these plural linguistic worlds.

For instance in the first broadsheet we encountered a problem in trying to translate the issues of Hyderabad Muslims. The term has a meaning because Hyderabad Muslims have an identity that is located in the history of the debate that occurred about Hyderabad, both in English and in Urdu. In Telugu this resonance is absent. The concept of the Hyderabadi Muslim does not have any meaning beyond that of ‘minority’. The sense of history, the sense of culture is not there, so how does one translate across this division.

Srivats: In fact what I found resonance with, in the SEZ broadsheet, was the essay which was translated by K. Sandhya, on the Chinese SEZ. The problem was not translating a Chinese world into a Telugu world but it is being able to translate a world which comes from the domain of academic writing, accurately to the Telugu by keeping it comprehensive. There is actually a world of academic writing also as opposed to the world of cultural writing, of a different complexity, and I felt that there was a precision in her translation of the argument about the Chinese SEZ into Telugu. I would also like to add a little bit to this notion of the world. The world we mean here is not the earth — the world is the large horizon that surrounds an individual; it links individual actions to a context, direction, purpose, meaning, broadly speaking, to a project. A person writing responds to that project – what a special economic zone is, how it would relate to Chinese modernization, how this process is to be described analytically, etc. It is responding to not to an inanimate context, but to a set of questions, a debate in that domain. If we want to translate this work to a Telugu general readership, we are trying to communicate the sense of that world or domain that determines his project. To make it clear, the individual’s purpose is determined by the world around him, by political and social context where that person is actually having a problem… so a person is writing, intervening in a particular way, for example, in an academic point on the China. Specifically, it is about the relationship between special economic zones and industrial development there. By translating it for a Telugu general readership one should be able to convey the sense of the community in which the writer is placed. Similarly while translating a story or poem from Telugu to English, you have to be aware of these negotiations, this project and this struggle of this person writing in Telugu, the debates and battles being fought, and try to evoke it in English.

Moid: I think that the world is nothing but the world view. The view we have of the world is the world for us – and it is rooted in the experiences around us. What I feel challenging and interesting is we have so many world views in the space of our own country and therefore so many languages because each language is supposed to express a particular kind of cultural experience, landscape and the particular world view which speakers of it have. Then we get something common as well as something not common, for example Telangana Telugu and Andhra Telugu. The problem is how to translate from one language to the other… translating culture, translating concepts, translating experiences, thoughts, emotions and all those things.

Suneetha: I think it is important to stress on what you both said i.e., language-worlds are not self contained but are connected by world-views. And these connections that cut across political issues, academic writings or cultural writing are what facilitate translation.

Moid: I think our understanding has been improved because of our effort to keep it bilingual. If it were kept only in English, we wouldn’t have faced these problems and we wouldn’t have understood all this.

What did you mean by the idea of force in translation?

Srivats : I would like to counter pose the concept of the world for translation with the force of the sentence in the first language. It seems to me while the world suggests an over-all picture of translation, the notion of force is actually exerted at the level of finest detail of the word or sentence. In an academic translation from English to Telugu, force will be its precision and the way it relates to terms around it. If you take a poetry translation from Telugu to English, force will have different meaning altogether, what the sentence means, how each sentence is stated assume importance. In order to grasp the world it is necessary to capture and convey the force of the statement with rigor and precision involved in it. And the rigor and precision comes, not simply from an exact use of a word in English because the connotation would be entirely different, but from an attempt to find a very precise equivalent for that in the language into which you are translating… so to establish that force it means the translator has to judge the kind of force that person being translated is exerting in her world, and try to figure out what the equivalent should be in English in order to convey that to the English reader. The Telugu reader reads directly the force within the world shared with the original writer whereas in the reader in translation has to be educated to the world in which the text was originally written. So the translator should be able to convey this. The person who is reading the translation is often opening a window on to the other world and so the ability to convey force is what actually gives the translation its life. So if you take a text, for a nominal example (and this is not a comment on the existing translation!), Antarani Vasantam and translate it without any life or force in English, it will read as sentences which are somewhat like close to what that person says—not idiomatically, but clumsily; whereas if we are able to translate it with verve, with rigor, a certain force, that text comes alive in the English.

Suneetha: Yes, there is a certain economy of words which doesn’t mean simply stringing them together. In some instances certain phrases require two or three additional sentences to convey what the author means but there are certain phrases in which I have actually resisted from using additional words or sentences because I wanted the reader to feel the tension. I wanted the reader to go to the additional effort of finding what the author has meant, to think more, and so in those contexts I have actually kept the translation to a minimum. Conveying force therefore requires different strategies.

Moid: Force is such a crucial thing, especially if you want to convey specific kind of emotions and feelings. In translating a scientific text, a very technical text this problem perhaps doesn’t arise. Accuracy is more important there. When you translate cultural material, such as experiences, I think force becomes very important. I think there is a classical problem here is…do you need to be loyal to text or to the meaning? What do you choose? And it’s a difficult choice. If one is loyal to the text you may lose the grip of the meaning and if you want to be loyal to the meaning your translation will not be loyal to source text.

Srivats : Each has to be calibrated …

Suneetha: Yes, calibrated…

Srivats: At the level of the sentence and sometimes at the level of the word: the better the translation the finer its calibration.

Moid : There is also this technical view that a good translation becomes possible only if you are an expert in the subject, in the source language and in the target language. It would be easier if one is expert in both the languages but if you don’t know the subject the decision will take some more time – it will not be very automatic, spontaneous …

Srivats : It is very difficult to meet this demand for double expertise if you also take subject also to be occupation, say agriculture – if you are translating from the Telugu Dalit text to English, and I am speaking from my experience. To know the subject means to know the agricultural vocabulary and very few people are going to have command over English and command over Telugu and command over the agricultural vocabulary and even the translator is always going to be a mismatch to the demand on many occasions.

Suneetha : to expand both your points, translating and conveying the force of the argument, of the language and of the project of the person, is not the matter of the expertise. I think it’s the matter of trust. And it is like a craft. Each time it would be different and not a mechanized kind enterprise. Of course, you do have Google translation but it will be only a Google translation. So, it is going to be imperfect … it is not going be perfect.

Moid : There is a machine translation and what we do is a specific translation, you can’t compare both!

Srivats: The third issue under discussion is one of translating concepts.

Suneetha : Yeah! Concepts bring back the world again actually in a much more concrete manner. I think we have faced issues in rendering some concept or the other in each of the broadsheets, haven’t we? Right from finding words like ‘sphurana’ for connotation, for eminent domain, public purpose in the SEZ broadsheet, various terms in the Aarogyasri and sexual harassment broadsheets. We had to coin new words especially from English to Telugu. Even in the SEZ broadsheet we had to address this, especially when we were trying to translate eminent domain or public purpose. The term public is translated as people or belonging to a people in Telugu. But public is a domain that is not borne out of collective action alone nor does it belong to all people equally. It is a product of modernity that has possibilities for universal belonging but is not reducible to people.

Moid: I think we have been successful in dealing with these concepts.

Suneetha: I am not very sure.

Srivats : Yes, the concept inhabits its own discourse. It has a set of supporting terms which give it meaning … it works in relation with these terms and somebody who has thought of this concept has elaborated those relationships and shows how the concept lifts something out from the buzz of everyday life—but to do that in the translation, means to find out what is the equivalent labor there for that person who has not facing it as the original reader but is trying to figure out what the labor of the concept is in the original.

Moid : The reason why I said we were successful in the concepts is that I have seen translations in Urdu journals, some postmodern texts being translated to Urdu.. I often get lost in trying to figure out what is being said. Whereas my experience with the broadsheet is that I don’t feel lost — I understand what is being said…

Srivats : Deleuze argues that to manufacture a concept is to lift something out of the flow. The reason why I am saying this is..the translation is actually bringing into the target language something new – you have to lift something out in the flow of the target language in order to reflect the problematic in the source language… you are trying to show the person the reflection of what is happening there … so you actually need to set up the reflection of the concept as a mirror.

Moid: That was the original intention of the broadsheet, wasn’t it? We put together each issue with a focus in a related contextual and conceptual field. In each broadsheet we try to provide a broad spectrum of perspectives and related concepts. Not all are politically correct but they all provide the frame of reference for the argument in the target language. The idea is to convey what’s happening.