About the Blog

This is my diary....what I make sense of, around me. You'll find short prose on contemporary topics that interest me. What can you expect - Best adjectives? …. hmm occasionally, tossed around flowery verbs ?…. Nope, haiku-like super-brevity? … I try to. Thanks for dropping by & hope to see you again

May 1, 2009

Rediscovered in Translation


I recently wrote a small piece on the elections in my Kannada blog Parikalpane which was admirably translated into English by Anuj Valmiki. I have reproduced his effort here (in Pic). He probably was responding to a call made by my friend Shaz who found a lot of what was written going over his head! Coming to translation, it is said that the genius of the English language is the genius of the people who use it. However democratic this language may be , it still cannot fathom or replicate many of the words that we commonly use in our vernacular languages. A given set of words will have various meanings or shades of thoughts when woven into a sentence, so even though the translation may bring out some comprehension it may not necessarily capture its essence. This is because words are loaded with meaning that is more than just definition; we invest them with an emotion. Other words are based on evolved concepts. So what really happens is that , more often than not, it gets rediscovered in translation. In a larger context it may have got to do with the cultural differences, a prism through with the emotions & feelings gets translated into language.

1 comment:

Anuj Valmiki said...

Agree with you on the differences between languages.. However, with a little effort and by grafting words from related languages (English has always effectively borrowed from french, Italian etc.) we can make it stick.

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