Taking Tamil to the World through the Language of Languages: Translation

The Tamil Nadu government is the first and only State government to undertake such translation initiatives with the goal of spreading literature beyond linguistic barriers.

- Mini Krishnan

We live in a translational world. Therefore to ignore the power of translation is to deny its role in the building of civilizations. There would have been no Renaissance, no modern medicine, no road or bridge engineering the knowledge of which was translated from Arabic, Latin and Greek into European languages to form the Industrial Revolution. No astronomy, no mathematics, no Bible. Translation militates against any kind of forced or fabricated monoculture and translators are the true if silent world leaders of today. They form a counter to the fascist and totalitarian attempts to monopolize reading and thinking and to homogenize all thought and expression.

But there is a catch. Though we know that the chief goals of any publishing venture have always been ideolological and commercial, translation, particularly when scaffolded on aesthetics, has always needed patronage and support. The Knowledge Empire of Baghdad in the 11th-12th centuries, the Bureau of Translation the Emperor Akbar set up in the 16th, and the translation of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian texts by the East India Company in the 18th-19th were all sponsored ventures.

To set the context in India: for more than 60 years the National Book Trust and the Sahitya Akademi have built wonderful treasure troves of translations into and out of the languages recognized by the Constitution but their reach has been limited. The National Translation Mission concentrates on knowledge texts and that too has had a rocky passage since it was set up in 2006.