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Narnia speaks Hindi now

For those who are worrying about the recession, here?s a whole new (well, almost) sector opening up.

For those who are worrying about the recession, here?s a whole new (well, almost) sector opening up. The just set up National Translation Mission requires 8,000 translators, 2,000 copy editors and 2,000 evaluators to man it, with Rs 99 crore from the union government financing the job.

Not many are aware, of course. Anything that?s not in English barely makes news. In a country of a billion plus people, only about 10 million Indians use English as their first language. Yet an estimated 40-45% of the (again estimated) Rs 7,500 crore Indian publishing industry?s sales come from English publishing. Unending colonial hangover?

Yes, India has more people who know English than in its land of origin. Though most Indians are more comfortable in their mother tongues, our toffee-nosed English publishing sector, the only one really publicised by the media, is just waking up to this fact. But as Kannan, publisher of the Chennai-based Kalachuvadu group that translates books into Tamil, points out: ?Authors are keen to see their work in many languages even when it does not mean much revenue. The international trend is marginal writings and Indian English publishing must turn to Indian languages to trace these expressions.?

Burgeoning portfolios

CEO of Harper PM Sukumar reminisces, ?We grew up on English and Hindi translations of Russian works, so translation is important if we want to read the richest literatures in the world.? He agrees with Kannan: ?This is the right time to get into bhasha publishing because people want to read good writing, be it original writings or good translations.? Harper has just launched into translations, with a Hindi imprint of the seven Chronicles of Narnia volumes. On the card are Hindi versions of Paulo Coelho?s The Witch of Portobello, Doris Lessing?s The Grass is Singing, and VS Naipaul?s A House for Mr Biswas. Harper is also translating English, Spanish, Portuguese and other languages into Hindi.

?While Indian language newspapers have been doing well, may be the Indian language books market has not been tapped in a proper manner,? says Naved Akber, Penguin Indian Languages section head. Penguin, India?s leading English publisher, which launched its language programme in 2005, is now doing translations from English into bhasha languages and vice versa. Languages like Malayalam and Bangla have high literary rates and hence large publishing markets, including the translation market. ?The Malayalam book market has been performing well since 1960s,? points out Krishna Kumar of the State Institute of Languages, Kerala (SIL). Since SIL was established to encourage the production of higher level academic books in Malayalam in 1968, Kumar says all the major Malayalam publishers have come out with academic, literary or popular translations.

Leading publisher of Hindi books, Hind Pocket Books has been publishing translations from Bengali, Marathi and Gujarati for 30 years. Publisher Shekhar Malhotra estimates that the Hindi translations market is worth about Rs 50 crore. Katha, which has been a translation pioneer in contemporary India, translates from 21 Indian languages. Founder Geeta Dharmarajan estimates the children?s market alone to be at around Rs 70 crore, of which the Hindi market is about 30-40%.

Westland editor Nilanjana Roy informs us that they are also translating English books into other Indian languages ? from literary works like Saeed Mirza?s Ammi to self-help books like the Chicken Soup for the Indian Soul series. Wisdom Tree began with the Hindi translation of The Alchemist a couple of years back but, as publisher Shobhit Arya says, the book exposed them to a unique readership ? readers who are well versed in both English and Hindi. So the group is now expanding into more translations, including those from Marathi into English.

Beyond regionalisms

Dharmarajan points out that bhasha books didn?t have lucrative markets because most Indians were not literate and educated citizens weren?t interested in educating the underprivileged. But ?things are changing dramatically with more young people going to school What we do is help good stories break the shell of regionalism and encourage their further translation into other languages.?

Routledge editor Jaya Bhattacharya Rose adds that there?s new disposable income in regional languages. And with people not just looking at text books but also others, publishers only stand to benefit from a cross pollination that will expand their stable of authors. As Kumar says, although the percentage of translations is presently around 20-25% in Malayalam, it has the scope to expand to 50% of the total market.

Author and translator Ira Pande adds, ?Bhasha literature is about small towns and villages. That is where the greatest changes have traditionally taken place. It is important to get this across so that, hopefully, this may one day cross-pollinate our slick English writing with new ideas and idioms.?

Substantiating how people in power in Indian publishing have devoted little attention to developing the non-English market, OUP Editor-Translations Mini Kurien tells us that while working on a 4,000-page critical survey of Indian literature for Macmillan, she found that at least 1,000 texts mentioned in the comparative Indian literature volume were not available in English translations. Roy adds: ?I think translations do pretty well ? but it depends very strongly on the individual book, just as with the original works? market. Actually the average Indian is far more open to the idea of reading in translation than, say, the average American; and there?s also a growing diaspora market for works in translation from various Indian languages.?

?Translation should be paced up ? from Bhasha books to English and vice versa,? agrees Sukumar. ?Our literature from all bhashas should be translated more and more and sent out into the world.? Dharmarajan says we need to take pride in our backyard productions. ?Raising the quality of literary translation, putting the names of translators on the covers of books, giving equal fees to writer and translator and giving translators equal space in the bionotes have helped,? she asserts.

Challenges ahead

Translations face a myriad of challenges. For instance, as Kurien points out, some of our languages are more than a 1,000 years old, and it takes great care to move their meaning into simpler languages that have no equivalents for our complex kinship terms or caste hierarchies or religious prejudices and so on. Once you take the culture of English readership into consideration, Kurien says what you have ?is a compromise, a negotiation, a constant juggling. Successful translations straddle two worlds. It isn?t a matter of two languages but two encyclopaedias.?

Dharmarajan points out that the editing of bhasha stories in translation needs a range of professionals, including dedicated and creative editors. ?Unless the Indian government promotes translations in a big way ? as do other countries like Ireland ? and unless academics take translation seriously ? again as in other countries ? to translate, comment, critique, teach, translation has a bleak future,? she says.

?You must be both fluent in both languages and be a terrific editor to be a good translator,? adds Pande. And Kannan exclaims, ?When I see a translator from English who does not translate phrases literally, I am sold.?

Also needed are ?alternative marketing strategies and out of the box approaches that can spread the market for books in Indian languages,? says Mita Kapur, literary consultant and freelance writer, who organised the successful Siyahi festival in Jaipur earlier this year.

Fiction, especially novels and short stories, do well in translation. But an autobiography that has caught the imagination of the public in its source language might also do very well in English translation. Dalit writing especially by women has a good market too, as do self-improvement and inspirational books. In Malayalam, new knowledge areas are keeping pace with popular fiction. So it is no wonder that the number of translated works is increasing. Hind Pocket Books did 30 titles last year, up from 20 the year before, with plans to soon bring out 50 titles a year. Penguin tries to maintain a balance of 50-50% between original Hindi titles and the translations.

Translations are slowly getting into award categories too. The Crossword Book Award recognises Indian language writing that has been translated into English. This year, Govardhan?s Travels by Anand CP Sachidanandan, translated by Gita Krishnankutty and Sankar?s Chowringhee translated by Arunava Sinha jointly won the best Indian Language Fiction Translation prize. Translated fiction now contributes approximately 5% of the total fiction sales at Crossword, says a spokesperson.

Price is a sensitive factor. While NBT and Sahitya Akademi have kept their prices low, experts feel factoring in the cost of translations pushes up the prices. With the Hindi market for instance being price sensitive, Sukumar?s readers are looking for hardbacks that cost as little as Rs150 but look as good as the English titles. But Dharmarajan points to a silver lining, that translations that used to cost around three times the original language texts have now dropped to just about twice the price.

Still the wind definitely blows more one way than the other. ?Translation is definitely a two-way process, but we translate more from English into Hindi,? says Akber, with the content, saleability and of course the reputation of the author playing a role in deciding which books to translate. Adds Arya that it is critical to exploit the renewed interest in reading brought on by bestselling translations.

On a cautionary note, Kapur explains that although it looks like a lot of wonderful work is being done on the translation and publishing scene, it is confined to niche areas, with little communication between the various institutions operating in the field. Pande actually bemoans institutionally sponsored translations: ?Our Hindi departments have promoted the worst kind of Sanskritised Hindi and tried to convert the normal language of communication into an academic discipline.?

Author Keerti Ramachandra says a good translator needs to have excellent command over both the source and target languages, a vast vocabulary, and familiarity with the culture, ethos and customs of the people depicted in the original work. ?Most important, the translator should be self-effacing, never forgetting that it?s the author?s voice that must come across and that the text is to be respected.?

A final challenge comes from the huge regional variations in language use, but the expanding appetite for local languages spreading across the country can turn this challenge on its head. In fact, as Roy tells us, ?one of the first questions that foreign agents are asking these days is, how many Indian languages do you intend to translate a book into ? and they are very surprised if you mention just one or two. I think there?ll be quite a shift in the next decade.? Amen to that.

Past Perfect

Translations are not new in India. The spread of Ramayana or Mahabharata across the length and breadth of the subcontinent happened through translations, and the versions are usually known by the names of their translators eg Kamba Ramayana in Tamil or Krittivas Ramayana in Bangla. These translators are actually celebrated as creators in their right. And these epics travelled far beyond India?s shores, matching a similar process of assimilation for non-Indian works coming to India. Tales from the Panchatantra, for example, have gone to many lands.

The remarkable Akbar (1556-1605) was famous for setting up a Maktabkhana or bureau of translations, and among the results was Razmnama, a translation of the Mahabharata into Persian, the court language. Other major works translated into Persian at the time included the Ramayana, Bhagavad-gita and the Atharva Veda. Akbar?s literary minded grandson Dara Shikoh translated 50 Upanishads under the name Sirr-i-Akbar or The Great Secret.

The colonial era gave a huge spurt to translation, and Fort William College, Calcutta, became an important centre for oriental studies, which included a hefty dose of translation as the first step towards cross cultural meetings. English increasingly became the link language for the new contours that the nation was acquiring. A good example was Omar Khayyam?s Rubaiyyat, which through its English translation by Edward Fitzgerald, influenced entire genres in various Indian languages. For instance the vernacular novel emerged under the heavy influence of its English counterpart. Bengali literature soon came to dominate among those in Indian languages, and translation from it became the norm in an era when the Oriental versus Anglicist debate was officially settled in favour of the latter.

The first half of the twentieth century saw Indian language writings, both in the original and in translation, play significant roles in the independence movement. Major writers like Tagore, Saratchandra, Premchand and Subramnia Bharati became household names beyond the geographical realms of their mother tongues. This was a spurt that fizzled out post independence as English soon established itself as the lingua franca.

National Translation Mission

Translation has a future. The National Knowledge Commission, set up in 2006 by the Prime Minister, has cleared the setting up of the National Translation Mission (NTM) in just the last week of June. To be implemented by the Mysore-based Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), the ambitious exercise will also involve the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT), the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the National Book Trust (NBT), the University Grants Commission (UGC), the Sahitya Akademi, the Granth Akademies and public library networks.

NTM will be expected to make available good-quality translation of knowledge-based texts into all eighth Schedule languages ? that?s 22 at the last count ?Assamese, Bangla, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali Oriya Punjabi Sanskrit Santhali Sindhi Tamil Telugu And Urdu. Its brief includes generating high-quality translation tools such as dictionaries and software, education of translator, development of scientific and technical terminology in all of the above and promotion of machine translation and machine-aided translation.

The plan is to translate 2,500 books in this plan period and another 8,000 in the next five years. The central government has released Rs 99 crore under the 11th Plan. Part of these monies will be used to hire the 8,000 translators 2,000 copy editors and 2,000 evaluators required for the mission.

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First published on: 13-07-2008 at 00:04 IST
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