The late nineteen eighties and nineties was an exciting period for the discipline of translation studies in India. The British phase of translation into English culminated in William Jone’s translation of Kalidasa’s Abhigyana Shakuntalam. All the major European minds of the 19th century were either Sanskritists or by their own admission had been deeply involved in Indian thought –Humboldt, Fichte, Hegel, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche, Schelling, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson. As the century progressed, Sanskrit studies immensely shaped the European mind.
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In 18th century, major universities in Europe had chairs in Sanskrit and Sanskrit studies had come to enjoy immense prestige. In the 17th -18th century, the great Sikh guru, Guru Gobind Singh set up a bureau and had a large number of Sanskrit texts translated into Punjabi. Dara Shikoh’s Persian translations of the Upanishads and Mulla Ahmed Kashmiri’s rendition of Mahabharata are among the major landmarks along this stream. Zain ul Abidin (1420 -1470), the ruler of Kashmir, established a bureau for bilateral renderings between Sanskrit and Persian. At the same time translation began to be done in the Persian language too. In the 11th century, Sanskrit texts began to be translated into Assamese, Kannada, Marathi, Telugu etc. In the early centuries of Christian era, Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese and later into Tibetan. So, through translations of creative writing, cultural bridges of understanding are securely constructed. This statement of Ramanujan’s “to translate a non-native reader into a native one” very simply but powerfully introduces the crucial notion of cultural translation. I remember A K Ramanujan, who while translating U R Ananthamurthy’s Novel Samskara opined, “A translator hopes not only to translate a text but hopes to translate a non-native reader into a native one. The translator’s purpose is not just to translate a printed literary text into another language but to be the mediator who could initiate and even induce the reader to internalize the representative text of an alien culture. Translation is a cultural fact that means necessarily cross-cultural exchange and understanding. Both linguistic equivalence and cultural transfer are at stake when translating. Though, today, there are few borders left that have not been breached by the internet, electronic mail and telecommunication, language may still be a barrier in communication and translation is necessary for successful communication.Ī language postulates in itself a model of reality and a phonic association with the universe it describes, so we cannot separate language from culture.
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Translation Translation: A cultural transferĪfter tens of thousands of years of evolution through which language was fundamental for the development of mankind, we have reached the age of globalization.