Translation

 Translation is the toughest art. Well, these days,  self-declared publishers are minting translations of  books by the dozens, and literally by the day. For one thing, these are all the "how to" books. How to become rich, how to save money, how to know literature without reading any original texts types! Actually the how to types, too, need to be translated sensitively. Who cares though? Monies matter to amateurs!

Well, the very word 'translation' means to 'carry across'. While translating, one is ferrying across not merely words, but a way of thinking, a mode of being and becoming, a style of thinking, a totally different world of sensitivities and sensibilities. 

Obviously, the most needed quality in a translator is not merely the total control over the source and taget languages, but actually over two cultures, right? Simplification is never the solution.

Let me give you a famous example. In the Bible, there is this rather well-known quote, "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak". Right now i am not going to go  in to the actual context of this quote, though actually that detail, too, matters a lot while translating sensitively.

Well, apparently, this quote got translated as "there is a lot of vodka, but there is little meat" in to Russian. Obviously to understand the joke, we need to know the word play on 'spirit' as well as the Russian predilection for drinking vodka, not to forget the food scarcity there, right?

Well, unfortunately, most poor translations go word by word. May be, the reader of "how-to" translations is least concerned with anything except a summarised simplification. In the process die wor(l)ds. Who cares though?

Pratima@ Words become worlds, if used with precision and sensitivity that no robotics can truly capture, and hence the need for transparent translation.