PyTorch, the open source framework used to build machine learning models, including those used for machine translation, released its newest version, 1.8, on March 4, 2021.
According to PyTorch’s official announcement, “highlights include updates for compiler, code optimization, frontend APIs for scientific computing, large scale training for pipeline and model parallelism, and Mobile tutorials.” Prior to this release, PyTorch released version 1.7 in October 2020.
Facebook’s AI Research Lab released PyTorch in September 2016. Since then, PyTorch has attracted attention among developers for its flexibility, speed, and ease of debugging.
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In an informal poll on LinkedIn, Tyler Folkman, Head of Artificial Intelligence at Branded Entertainment Network, asked colleagues to name their “go-to deep learning framework.”
“I personally prefer PyTorch because I think it has a good balance of usability and extendability,” Folkman wrote. “By that, I mean that I find the common stuff is pretty easy to do without too much code and the more complex architectures are also relatively straightforward to implement.”
Pro Guide: Translation Pricing and Procurement
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45 pages on translation and localization pricing and procurement, human-in-the-loop models, and linguist compensation.
On Twitter, Josh Tobin, an instructor at University of California, Berkley and past research scientist at OpenAI, suggested a generational divide: “Why do people always ask what ML framework to use? It’s easy: Jax is for researchers; PyTorch is for engineers; TensorFlow is for boomers.”
Microprocessor engineering legend Jim Keller, himself a boomer, told Lex Fridman in a February 2021 podcast that he knows many people who have switched from TensorFlow to PyTorch.
Slator 2021 Data-for-AI Market Report
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“The native language of people who write AI network programs is PyTorch now,” he said, noting how it is built to scale naturally. “If you write a piece of PyTorch code that looks pretty reasonable, you should be able to compile it and run it on hardware without having to tweak it and do all kinds of crazy things to get performance.”
Very Much an Applied Endeavor
What does this mean for machine translation (MT)? Experts hesitate to call PyTorch, which has yet to be widely deployed in production, the new standard. Other platforms, such as TensorFlow, are more established, with better visualizations, more pretrained models, and more support and tutorials.
Adam Bittlingmayer, CEO and co-founder of MT risk prediction API ModelFront, told Slator that the factors boosting PyTorch’s popularity for other machine learning tasks may not immediately apply to MT.
In the meantime, Bittlingmayer said, “It’s hard to know who is using an open-source library, but it looks like MarianNMT has the most traction right now.” (MarianNMT is notable for being written in pure C++, whereas most others are written in Python.)
“Machine translation is very much an applied endeavor. There’s so much that goes into making a good production system, so the tools that provide the most out of the box will win,” Bittlingmayer added. “The core algorithms themselves are easy to transfer across libraries and frameworks.”
The global Film Translation Market 2021 Research report provides information regarding market size, share, trends, growth, cost structure, global market competition landscape, market drivers, challenges and opportunity, capacity, revenue and forecast 2026. This report also includes the overall and comprehensive study of the Film Translation market with all its aspects influencing the growth of the market. This report is exhaustive quantitative analyses of the Film Translation industry and provides data for making strategies to increase the market growth and effectiveness. The report covers the post-COVID-19 (Corona Virus) impact on various regions and major countries and on the future development of the industry is pointed out.
Top Companies in the Global Film Translation Market: way Film, Novilinguists, Myanmar Translation, Today Translations, Morningside, LIDEX Translation, AlfaBeta, One Hour Translation, Gengo, Argos Multilingual, Nosmet and others.
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Film translation is the communication of meaning from one language (the source) to another language (the target) for a film.
This report segments the Film Translation market on the basis of Types is: Native Language Translation
Foreign Language Translation
Minority Language Translation
Special Language Translation
On the basis of Application, the Film Translation market is segmented into: Drama
Comedy
Horror Movie
Romance
Action Movie
Other
Regional Analysis For Film TranslationMarket: For comprehensive understanding of market dynamics, the global Film Translation market is analyzed across key geographies namely: North America (United States, Canada and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia), South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia), Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa).
Highlights the following key factors: – Business description: A detailed description of the company’s operations and business divisions.
– Corporate strategy: Analyst’s summarization of the company’s business strategy.
– SWOT Analysis: A detailed analysis of the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
– Company history: Progression of key events associated with the company.
– Major products and services: A list of major products, services, and brands of the company.
– Key competitors: A list of key competitors to the company.
– Important locations and subsidiaries: A list and contact details of key locations and subsidiaries of the company.
– Detailed financial ratios for the past five years: The latest financial ratios derived from the annual financial statements published by the company with 5 years history.
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Sometimes it’s where you’re from that sets up the initial perception of what you’ve done, no matter how horrific it is.
Robert Aaron Long is a 21-year-old “devout Christian,” according to his friends and fellow congregants at Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Ga.
Like many committed Southern Baptists struggling with the challenges and expectations of a purity culture that demands chastity until marriage, Robert Long has turned to both Jesus and guns with a holy passion.
On Tuesday, Robert Long killed eight people and injured a ninth in a shooting rampage that spanned the Atlanta area. Six of his victims were Asian women, one was a white woman and the other a white man. A Hispanic man was injured but is expected to make a full recovery.
Long became the latest mass shooter taken alive into custody by cops who never seem to be in a hurry to shoot white gunmen. We have no word on whether he was remorseful or if the arresting cops made a stop for fast food on the way back to the precinct house in a reprise of the way the cops escorting 21-year-old Dylann Roof did after he murdered nine parishioners at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015.
If Robert Long were from Karachi, Pakistan, and not the Atlanta suburbs, the headlines would’ve screamed some variation of the following the next day: “Islamic extremist kills 8 in hate-fueled shooting spree” — and folks would’ve been very unapologetic about it.
Instead, we were treated to far more nuanced headlines than what Robert Long deserved. In characterizing the suspect’s motives, authorities took into consideration his self-exonerating insistence that his reasons for killing were rooted in a desire to stymie his “sexual addiction” and not racial animus toward Asians per se.
Sure, three Asian-run spas were singled out for a massacre that looks suspiciously like ethnic intimidation, but in America, correlation does not imply causation, especially when gun-toting Caucasians are involved.
As it stands, Robert Long will face eight murder counts in a state that has the death penalty, so he isn’t going to walk free even if he is never charged with a hate crime. The problem is that the way American laws are constructed, it is difficult to file hate crime charges (and make them stick) against those who harass, victimize and kill Asian Americans, even when the crime is as blatant as the Atlanta shootings at three Asian American businesses.
One need only remember the miscarriage of justice that surrounded the killing of Chinese American draftsman Vincent Chin at a strip club in Highland Park, Mich., in 1982.
Mr. Chin was enjoying his bachelor party at the club when he got into an argument with two white men who resented Japan’s gains in the American auto market. They mistook the Chinese American and his friends as Japanese and poured out the kind of anti-Asian invective that has come back into vogue in the past year during the pandemic.
The argument spilled out into the parking lot where the autoworker assailants, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, beat Mr. Chin to death with a baseball bat. The duo, who claimed they were acting out of a sense of economic anxiety — not racism — were charged with second-degree murder, but successfully bargained it down to manslaughter a year later.
Neither received jail time, but they were ordered to pay $3,000 each and undergo three years’ probation for their trouble. They claimed they never used racial epithets in the fight, contrary to what Mr. Chin’s friends testified. The authorities took their word over the victims’ testimonies. Federal hate crime laws didn’t exist at the time.
“These weren’t the kind of men you sent to jail,” Wayne County Circuit Judge Charles Kaufman said about handing down the lenient sentences for Ebens and Nitz. “You don’t make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal.”
It should be noted that initially the local American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups failed to see Mr. Chin’s killing as a violation of his civil rights because the anti-Asian narrative in the Detroit area was so strong at the time.
To embrace the Vincent Chin case was to go against the prevailing sentiment in the rapidly collapsing Rust Belt — working-class whites wracked by economic insecurity get a pass when it comes to anti-Asian violence and racism.
The Detroit chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and American Citizens for Justice summoned the courage to fight for Mr. Chin and managed to get federal civil rights charges filed against Ebens and Nitz in 1984. Mixed verdicts and appeals led to Nitz being acquitted of all charges followed by Ebens in 1997.
Despite stunning victories in federal court, neither could escape civil suits from Mr. Chin’s family. To date, Ebens is still liable for $4 million in damages to the Chin estate, but his autoworker pension and retirement pay can’t be garnished. That’s why the Vincent Chin killing and its unsatisfactory aftermath is considered one of the most dramatic miscarriages of justice in American law. It demonstrates the inequitable treatment of Asian Americans when it comes to bias crimes against them. Even when hate crimes laws exist, how do you get them applied if every potential culprit exonerates himself by saying he/she has nothing against Asians?
From the beginning of the pandemic, the Trump administration never lost an opportunity to remind Americans that the “China flu” or “Wuhan flu” or “Kung flu” was responsible for shutting down the economy. Assaults and the intimidation of Asian Americans spiked by 150% as Mr. Trump’s moronic parakeets echoed his scapegoating of ethnically diverse communities.
Mr. Trump may be out of power, but the malignant racism he and his administration released on the Asian American and Pacific Islander community is still very much a part of the nation’s bigoted psyche. As recently as Tuesday night, Mr. Trump was on Fox News blaming the “China virus” for undermining and mostly shutting down the economy on his watch. Of course, he wouldn’t take any blame for the racist fallout from his words.
Already, the narrative on the right is that what happened in Atlanta has nothing to do with the dramatic uptick in violence against Asian Americans. That particular massacre was the work of a “sexually frustrated” young man who happened to “have a bad day” and took it out on six Asian women and two whites. Where’s the racial animus in that? And whatever you do, don’t start your whining about the easy availability of guns and the increased radicalization of white men.
Just as the Civil War was more about state’s rights than slavery for many right-wingers, an obvious act of racist killing that resulted in the marking of Asian women for death was “about something else.” Heaven forbid if this country gets another charge of wanton tolerance of racism lodged against it, especially during a pandemic when we’re especially susceptible to long-overdue pangs of conscience. The next thing you know, we’ll all be marching for the “rights” of another group with a grievance.
In America, everything is always about something else — even when it’s not.
From English to Arabic: Are Wikipedia’s Egalitarian Values Getting Lost in Translation?
Photo: Lane Hartwell on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation
The internet would be unrecognizable without Wikipedia. Thanks to the digital, open-collaborative encyclopedia, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, we now have unprecedented access to the sum of human knowledge; everything our species has learned and experienced, written, digitized and catalogued in easily digestible records. And it is all a few screen taps away.
If only things were that simple. This absurdly easy access masks a far more complicated reality. After all, Wikipedia attempts the impossible feat of keeping a record of the vast, universal human experience; the countless singularities, distinctions and paradigms it encompasses, and the great forces and events that have shaped people’s lives since the beginning of time.
The online encyclopedia, which is maintained by a community of contributors and volunteer editors, writers and researchers from across the world, has over 300 editions and is available in virtually all languages and dialects. This makes Wikipedia a fairly diverse platform, but as with all things created in the image of men, women are far from equally represented.
In Egypt, the MENA region and the Arabic-speaking world at large, a group of volunteers and contributors have been working tirelessly, creating over 1,000,000 articles for the Arabic edition of Wikipedia since its launch in 2003.
“On Wikipedia, content [written by and about] men is four times that of women and nine out of 10 editors are men, so there is a very big gap,” Amira*, a volunteer editor with over 600 entries on Arabic Wikipedia tells Egyptian Streets.
The Wikipedia gender gap has long been a challenge, not to mention a PR nightmare for the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that hosts and publishes the encyclopedia. With the foundation exercising little editorial control over the digital encyclopedia, Wikipedia’s content, policies, triumphs and shortcomings all reflect the community of contributors and volunteers who maintain its different editions.
These gaps may reflect outright sexism and misogyny or more insidious forms of discrimination, such as unconscious gender bias, but according to one of Wikimedia’s own, gender inequality is rife on the whole World Wide Web, not just Wikipedia.
“Content gaps exist all over the internet and Wikipedia especially. Women’s [representation] is low on the internet in general. On Wikipedia, [woman-authored] articles are less than 20 percent,” Wikimedia Community Brand and Marketing Coordinator Samir Elsharbaty explains.
In an effort to address its gender gap, the Wikipedia community has launched countless initiatives and projects to encourage women’s participation, such as competitions and edit-a-thons focused on women editors and subjects, as well as women’s issues and women-focused themes.
“The point is to close the gender gap and increase feminist content on Wikipedia. For us, it is also about increasing Arabic content, so we started to work, and many initiatives have been launched since mid 2014,” Amira explains.
Despite being ongoing for the past five years, this concerted effort to increase women’s representation on the platform culminated in 2019, with the first edition of WikiGap, a joint project with the Swedish government. This year’s global edition of WikiGap, which started on the 8th of March, in honor of International Women’s Day, and runs until the 8th of April, is focused on developing content about women human rights activists.
The Arabic edition, which only ran until the 14th of March, saw 570 articles created for the WikiGap Egypt edit-a-thon, compared to 127 last year. This visibility encourages more women to participate, according to Nadine*, an Egyptian medical student and Wikipedia editor.
“When it is women writing about women, it is not just about unbiased views, it also attracts more women to edit and write. When the person in charge of the initiative is a woman, women will be more incentivized to participate,” she remarks.
With this effort to create more women-focused content, the Wikipedia community is not only hoping to broaden the scope of its content, but also to attract more women editors to render a more accurate representation of women’s history.
“A woman writer will better understand the experiences of the women she is writing about,” Elsharbaty adds.
Despite this marked increase in women’s representation and the growing awareness of the importance of women’s visibility, other content biases, prejudices and gaps emerge on the platform’s many editions.
“There are also gaps when it comes to demographic distribution; content by contributors from North America and Western Europe is much greater than from Africa, Asia and South America. These are all types of gaps. I can tell you that we have a long way to go in order to achieve balanced content on the internet and there are massive efforts being exerted in order to change that,” Elsharbaty says.
For the digital encyclopedia’s Arabic edition, WikiGap had to undergo a few alterations. In Egypt and the MENA region, where gender inequality and other political, social and cultural issues extend to every aspect of public and private life, the local edition of the competition, announced by the Swedish Embassy in Egypt, called on potential participants to write about women in any field of their choice, perhaps conveniently steering clear of contentious social justice and political issues.
This transvaluation when moving between languages, cultures and worlds is nothing new. As with many multilingual content platforms and publications, events are retold from differing and, at times, conflicting perspectives. This explains why Hebrew Wikipedia refers to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank as the Jewish state’s “rule” of “Judea and Samaria.”
Similarly, Arabic Wikipedia has also taken on Arab and Muslim cultural perceptions about gender and sexuality, drawing criticism for its queerphobic editorial policy after deleting an article about late Egyptian human rights activist and gay icon Sarah Hegazi, citing “lack of notability,” despite there being Wikipedia entries about her in eight other languages, as well as an Arabic article on Egyptian Wikipedia.
These erasures can be chalked up to oversight, unconscious bias, or deeply entrenched cultural perceptions, but unlearning damaging and axiomatically immoral social constructs is imperative for the integrity of Wikipedia, which is something the Wikimedia Foundation is keen on addressing.
“The idea is for everyone to participate regardless of their beliefs, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, color, etc. The Wikipedia community tries to put in place policies that give everyone the right to express themselves and participate and to guarantee that the content is unbiased and for it to be substantiated by sources. Any community can make mistakes, but the efforts being made by the Wikipedia community are aimed at creating the most unbiased content possible.
“The Wikimedia Foundation supports the community in these decisions, and supports its independence when it comes to taking these steps and enacting these policies in order to develop unbiased content,” Elsharbaty says.
History, we are often told, is written by the victors. This disclaimer accompanies all of the knowledge we hold, reminding us that there is still so much we don’t and can’t possibly know—that when the vanquished died, all their secrets, narratives and struggles were laid to rest with them.
The promise of Wikipedia is that we don’t have to doubt the messenger and take everything they tell us with a grain of salt. The platform, we like to think, is distortion-proof because we have all taken part in writing it and we were all represented in the process by people who look and think and feel and love like us.
“If you want to create balanced content, it must be representative of the world. The world is not a white American man. It is made up of men and women, people of different viewpoints, beliefs, and different sexual orientations, from different parts of the world,” Elsharbaty muses.
Preserving Wikipedia’s integrity for posterity is perhaps the greatest challenge of our time, because it is the keeper of the world’s memory. And if we fail our moral responsibility to pass down a true and honest retelling of our lives and times and histories, history will judge us as harshly as we have those who came before us.
*Names have been changed to protect sources’ anonymity.
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PARIS - French language lovers could celebrate International Francophonie Day on Saturday with a new online interactive dictionary. Rolled out by the French government, it reflects not only the language’s evolution but also the reality that most of today’s speakers are not French.
Did you receive a "pourriel" or "throw a camel" today? If you are wondering what these expressions mean, you will not find the answers here in France. In Canadian French, a pourriel — a version of courriel, French for email — means spam mail. When you “lance un chameau” or throw a camel in the Democratic Republic of Congo, you have made a spelling mistake.
Both these expressions are included in a new online dictionary sponsored by the French government.
French Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot says the dictionary is not just for France’s 67 million citizens, but for the 300 million French speakers worldwide. It aims to modernize and enrich the French language, she says, embracing its evolution.
President Emmanuel Macron proposed the idea of this Francophones’ Dictionary in 2018. The dictionary already contains about 600,000 terms.
It got a new word last week, when Louise Mushikiwabo, who heads the International Organization of la Francophonie, representing French-speaking countries, proposed “techniquer” — which in her native Rwanda means figuring out creative solutions with limited resources.
Unlike past dictionaries, which were products of elite French academics, this dictionary is interactive, democratic — and a work in progress. Anybody can propose a word. A group of experts will decide whether it should be added.
So, what do non-French francophones think about the new dictionary? A stroll through a multicultural Paris neighborhood provided some insight.
Mimi, from Senegal, immediately checked out the dictionary on her smartphone. She couldn’t think of any words to propose right away, but she found the idea interesting.
Longtime resident Nicole Sika offered up “go” — which means your female friend in her native Ivory Coast — or “zo” — which means you are smartly dressed.
Other French dictionaries have expanded their lexicon. The iconic Le Petit Larousse French dictionary has added words like “taxier” — an Algerian expression meaning, not surprisingly, taxi driver. But this new, interactive dictionary is the first sponsored by France’s government, ending three centuries in which only the elite French Academy determined which words to include.
“The French no longer have a monopoly on French,” French magazine L’Express wrote recently, “and that is good news.”
At night, an hour of Korean almost-soap-opera relaxes me and sends me into sweet dreams. I’ve watched several series, but my favorite is “Crash Landing on You” (on Netflix). If you can handle subtitles, persevere through the first hour and you will likely be hooked.
I’m a longtime believer in the power of fiction to offer insights into other cultures, thereby offering insights into our own. Korean dramas are no exception.
“Crash Landing on You” made me think about “saudade,” a Portuguese word I learned years ago. It means a feeling of longing for someone, despite knowing the person may never return. Even though it doesn’t translate directly into English, I understood it because I’ve felt it. It was foreign and familiar.
I finished watching “Crash Landing on You” two months ago and still can’t quite shake it. Ironically, I have “saudade” for a show about “saudade.” The Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo describes “saudade” best — “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy."
Words we don’t have in English spark little joy particles all around my brain and heart. Thankfully, in recent weeks, I’ve learned several from a variety of sources.
In a conversation with a Swedish friend this week, she paused to find the best word to express her feelings on the topic at hand. She speaks masterful English and comes up with the right word more quickly than I do, so I waited patiently. When she opted for a Swedish word, I paid attention, knowing this would be a word I would want to know.
She said that doing the work we were discussing has been an “ynnest.” She went on to explain that the literal translation of the word is “favor, indulgence, privilege, grace,” and that the word can, in a legal sense, mean favor or privilege, as opposed to a legal right to something — as in, being granted a special privilege or favor.
“But in everyday language it is used as a description of the emotion or moment of insight into the honor, delight, appreciation, gratitude of being in a particular situation,” she said.
My Swedish friend is an opera singer by training. COVID has, of course, affected her life in a major way.
To explain the meaning of the word further, she said, “Besides being happy to be paid to sing opera, it is an ‘ynnest’ to get to share the music I love with other human beings looking for an experience of beauty or excitement out of the ordinary hum-drum of daily life.”
Recognizing my interest in the words we don’t have in English, she offered a few more she wished existed in English, including “lyhörd.” She said that a room that is lyhört has thin walls that you can hear everything through, but a person who is lyhörd is someone who is sensitive, listens carefully, picks up on the subtle signals in people and situations and is able to respond accordingly.
Earlier this year, I read a book called “Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home,” by Nora Krug. Krug writes a lot about the importance of the forest in German life and culture. She wrote that the Grimm Brothers started a German dictionary in 1838 which lists more than a thousand nouns and adjectives containing the word “wald,” which means “forest” in German. Her personal favorites are “waldeinsamkeit,” which means “forest solitude” and “waldumrauscht,” which means surrounded by a rustling forest.
Lastly, in a conversation this week with a Chinese friend, she mentioned the word “yuánfen,” which encapsulates a Chinese belief that people can be destined to meet, often in fateful coincidences. While it can be used regarding love, it is also applied to other relationships. As I understand it, no friendship is above or beneath the concept of “yuánfen.” However, my young Chinese friend says the word is not used loosely, but reserved for when relationships reach a deep level.
Learning words that exist in other languages that don’t translate directly into English feeds my soul and gives me much to ponder about how language and concepts develop.
Every week, I read my column to my husband before sending it in. This week, I was struggling to find an ending so I read it to him sans ending and said, “I’ve been working on this column since the day before yesterday.”
He started laughing.
I turned around and asked, “What’s funny?”
He said, “In Spanish, the word ‘antier’ means ‘day before yesterday.’”
In Bangla, the term ‘babu’ is a term of respect, politeness, and a title all combined into one. But in literature, it can also be used as a taunt against the upper-class Bhadralok. When translated in English, it is difficult to find a word that can wholly encompass the cultural depth that this one word holds in Bangla.
This is the fundamental yet “interesting” challenge of translating literature, says author and translator Arunava Sinha, who has translated numerous Bengali texts to English. Literature comes from varying contexts within a particular language and while translating these, it is difficult to capture the particular “flavour” of the language that a novel imbibes, he says.
But the real crisis in Indian translation is not cultural loss, it’s the role that languages play in the field of translation, and the hierarchy that they fall under.
We all know India is home to a lot of languages and dialects — some peg the number at 400, others at 600. But the official number recognised by the Indian government stands at 22.
Within these, some have always enjoyed a privileged position of being widely translated. Languages such as Bangla, Malayalam and Tamil have been at the apex of this pyramid and continue to be. According to Sinha, Malayalam is perhaps the language that is being translated to English the most at the moment. But now, there are other emerging contenders and languages like Marathi and Kannada have also gained a lot of prominence in translation circuits.
But even though all of these are already widely spoken and well-known languages, with rich histories of literature and theatre, they still have the ‘emerging’ tag beside them. Therefore, a natural question to ask is when will the time come for languages like Western Pahari, whose script Tankri is considered one of the oldest written forms in South Asia. Or any of the several dialects spoken in the Northeast, which accounts for more than 200 literary traditions of the Tibeto-Burman language group. Will it ever come?
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A cultural hierarchy
Sahitya Akademi, which is widely considered the top literary body in the country, hands out translation prizes every year — but only for India’s official 22 languages. In this scenario, it is hard not to see why some translations are more prominent than others.
I looked through 27 published issues of Translation Today, a biannual peer-reviewed journal by the National Translation Mission, Central Institute of Indian Languages, which began in 2004. My search included the latest issue that was published in 2020. In the few issues that carried translations, the texts were primarily from, you guessed it right, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Bangla and Marathi.
Even my own experience as a student of English Literature is testament to this hierarchy. The translations that I studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate were mostly in Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi. I had one short story in Odia, Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Rebati (a lovely read), and another interesting text was The Untouchable Spring by Dalit author Kalyan Rao, originally translated from Telugu. Notably, it was the latter two texts that had the least amount of research done on them. Compared to the likes of Amrita Pritam, Premchand, Rabindranath Tagore, the critical engagement with these texts were extremely limited.
As Daisy Rockwell, an American translator who translated Hats and Doctors, a collection of short stories by Hindi writer Upendranath Ashk, explained, “In the power balances of the world, not all languages are equal, nor are their histories, nor are their pairings.”
And if there exists a language hierarchy, it is directly related to an unspoken hierarchy of cultures and states. For instance, ‘big cultures’ like Bangla and Punjabi are more likely to get recognition compared to others. This is not to say that lesser-known cultures do not have robust literature of their own. Then why this linguistic hierarchy?
According to Aruni Kashyap, assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, who is also a prominent Assamese translator, this ‘crisis’ in Indian literary translation — if one calls it that — is arguably a postcolonial one.
“Hindi and Bengali have widely spoken South Asian languages and surely will have more power inherent in them. This is natural, and I have no problem with that. It would be foolish to grudge that there are around 250 million Bengali speakers as opposed to only 20 million Assamese speakers or 3 million Bodo speakers. But this becomes a problem if people in positions of power refuse to treat all languages equally,” he tells me.
According to Kashyap, there is also a strong publishing nexus that contributes to this disparity. “Publishers and agents must make a conscious effort to make translations readily available. Not just from Assamese, but any language and especially works from underrepresented literary cultures.” He explains that the main challenge is that literary works from these languages are not seen as ‘valuable’ or ‘commercially viable’.
“Publishers say without shame that they can’t ‘sell’ when it is their job to find a way to sell works with literary merit.”
Corporate capitalism is pretty much the same everywhere, even when it comes to art and literature, and this proves it.
Also read: 11,000 typists, speeches, statue — How N.T. Rama Rao promoted Telugu at the cost of Urdu
Dearth of translators
But, as Arunava Sinha points out, this disparity in Indian languages that are translated may have less to do with hierarchical notions of the language and more with a lack of translators from many of these languages. One of the reasons that Bangla and Malayalam have so many translations is because of the abundance of skilled, well-established translators.
Even Dr K. Sreenivasarao, secretary of Sahitya Akademi, in an interview, talked about how this lack of translators leads to a lack of exposure for regional writers.
And this is still in the field of translations from regional languages to English. When it comes to translations in different languages within India, Sinha says it’s more a function of local publishers in the states. And with the publishing industry being so unstable, especially with the pandemic, it is not hard to see why there isn’t as much initiative.
Even this infrastructural deficit of lack of translators is, I believe, a product of unequal opportunities and lack of pedagogy in most regional languages. A simple frame to measure this would be by looking at the number of English departments in colleges across the country. If I ask you to name a college that offers a degree in English, several names will immediately pop up. But if I ask you the same for Odia or Naga or Garhwali, the recollection is likely to not be as quick.
But changes are afoot, in the past few years, there have been several attempts to recover literature from several endangered and forgotten languages. For instance, recently, short stories from Tulu, an endangered Dravidian language, were translated to English and released by two scholars of the language. Furthermore, last year, Gautam Choubey translated Phoolsunghi, a 1977 Bhojpuri novel by Pandey Kapil, and it was the first novel in the language to be translated into English. Another interesting text is Jenny Bhatt’s translation of the short story collection Ratno Dholi by Gujarati writer Dhumketu, who was a contemporary of Tagore and Premchand.
Also read: How colleges will offer engineering in languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati from 2021
Evolving role of a translator
Within this complex socio-cultural milieu, an emerging debate that has cropped up has been about the role of a translator.
For instance, there was widespread outrage after a White translator was appointed to translate the poems of Black American author Amanda Gorman, now famous for her performance at US President Joe Biden’s inaugural ceremony, to Dutch. According to critics, Gorman’s poetry should be translated by someone who is more attuned to her context — a Black, feminist, female activist. Yet, others feel that this will severely limit who can translate a particular text.
This signals a shift towards a conventional understanding of a translator as someone who should be an invisible figure. A translator’s presence within a translated text is as important as the source author’s, and this is beginning to be rightly acknowledged.
The three translators I spoke to regarding this had interesting contours to this debate.
Kashyap said that he was more comfortable translating texts within contexts that he was familiar with. “I prefer to translate works only if I have a comfortable working relationship with the author of the original text.”
For Sahni, in an ideal world, a translator will meet the metrics required in terms of the cultural context of a particular text. But we do not inhabit that ideal world and, in India, the question of identity itself is a “complex matrix”. “I would say that translators who don’t have the same experiences should not stop translating, but they can also do their best to find translators who display those qualities.”
Meanwhile, Rockwell maintains that she doesn’t “believe that White translators should never translate the works of authors of colour, or that literature of colonised language should never be translated into coloniser languages”. But she feels these choices should be open to discussion and that some pairings work better than others. “Very often it is the case in India that there are zero to one translators willing to translate a given text, so arguing about the identity of the translator would be a bit absurd.”
At the same time, she also acknowledged the privilege that some translators may have over the other, for instance, a Black translator compared to a White one.
This privilege cuts across gender and caste, most prominently, in India. Yogesh Maitreya’s book Of Oppressor’s Body and Mind talks about how savarna translators have been able to turn a profit by translating Dalit texts. Maitreya, writer and founder of Dalit publishing house Panther’s Paw, looked specifically at translations of Dalit literature in Marathi and noted that savarna translators had converted the demand for Dalit texts into a “saleable commodity” and profit-making venture, without exhibiting any responsibility towards fostering an anti-caste ideology. Listing 11 prominent books translated to English that have become part of literature courses in India and abroad, from Aidan by Urmila Pawar to A Current of Blood by Namdeo Dhasal, Maitreya points out how all the texts by Dalit/Buddhist writers have been translated by Brahmins or savarna translators.
In terms of gender, Rockwell revealed that there is a systemic bias against female authors worldwide. “Women are encouraged to write less, are mentored less, are published less, are translated less. At each step in this sequence, arguments can be made that there are simply fewer women writers.” This inequality, she says, manifests in translation as well, just by virtue of the fact that “there are far more male authors to choose from”, and publishers and translators alike may argue that their choices simply reflect the reality of industry.
In terms of lobbies to possibly address these issues, there is an Indian Translators Association but it seems to be quite defunct — the last update on its website was in 2018.
In 2018 as well, author Jenny Bhatt and a group of writers and translators attempted to establish a ‘Writers’ & Translators’ Association India’ to “ campaign and lobby as a self-governing group for better industry practices to help the overall publishing ecosystem grow and thrive”.
However, the effort fizzled out due to a lack of interest from writers and translators.
The crux of the matter is that translation is a highly complex undertaking and the work and the effort that goes into producing a well-translated text deserve a spot in the open. The common idea of translation being akin to a poor cousin of an ‘original’ text needs to be challenged.
The change in attitude is happening and translations are, in fact, even winning awards. It is gradual, but this fascinating and ever-evolving branch of literature needs to be spoken of more and understood more, for its diversity, complexity, historicity and effort.
Views are personal.
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