The art of translation held centre stage on the concluding day of Manipal University’s lit fest at the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities here on Sunday.
According to a release, several linguistic practitioners, littérateurs and translators shared their opinions on translations and their importance in Indian literature. Velcheru Narayana Rao, professor of Telugu and Indian Literature at Emory College of Arts and Sciences, in a video conference, spoke about practices of translation before the 19th century in India. Speaking extensively on the translatability of Indian languages, he said: “Most of the Indian languages share the same base in terms of semantic, syntactic, phonetic and alphabetic organisation.”
A panel discussion on ‘The Art of Translation’ was held, with Alex Ruiz Falques, Sajal Dey, Nalini Thampi, N.T. Bhat and Kamala Ramaswamy as the panellists and Rahul Putty as the moderator.
Ms. Ramaswamy cited angika or ‘physical expression’ as a cause. “Every language has its own angika . For example, take the film Gandhi . It was originally in English but when dubbed in Hindi, the physical expressions of all remained English.” She stressed the role of culture and history with respect to translation of work among various media.
Dr. Falques, on the other hand, emphasised the challenges as a positive aspect as they convey a larger base for connotations, giving way for the works of commentators to come into the light. Dr. Bhat opined that the problem of translation was that more often than not, there is no feedback, and so the translator never knows how qualitatively acclaimed his or her work truly is.
Deepa Ganesh, senior journalist, conducted a translation workshop titled ‘Translating vachanas into English’.
