When I think of all the times I have shared misunderstandings with a friend or family member, I wonder about the gap between us and language. There is always a gap. We try our best to fill it. But our thoughts never fully translate. One often reduces language to a tool of communication or information exchange. But isn’t this what animals do? They communicate their hunger, pain, lust, through noises and gestures. They don’t gossip, narrate folklore, write fiction, or poetry, or critically review a body of work. That is a human trait, to create. And language is a register of its own, in which we all exist. We use language as much as it uses us. We are driven by language that preexists us, we are born into it and get subjectivised in it. To articulate one’s thoughts into language, adjusting for context, tone, form, nuance, itself is an act of translation. That is the differential nature of language.
Speaking in one language itself is a struggle, translation between two compounds, and complicates the struggle. Let’s consider the word “our,” relating to ‘us’. There are two words that convey the same meaning in Tamil, நம்ம, “namma” and நாங்க “naanga.” “Namma” includes everyone in the scene while “naanga” indicates a particular group within the all. There is no differentiation for this in English.
Idioms are another fun element of language, and usually tricky to translate. How does one describe the phenomenon of rain falling while the sun shines? The common name for this is sunshower, but there is an English phrase, “the devil is beating its wife” that is also used. In South Africa, a common expression derived from the Zulu language is “a monkey’s wedding”, while in Tamil we say something in the line of: காக்காவிற்கும் நரிக்கும் கல்யாணம், kaakaavirkum narikkum kalyanam “the crow and the fox are getting married”
When one sits in front of a text, reading it over and over again, one not only catches the ‘information’, but also the context, the tone, the time and place it is set in, the cadence in the writer’s style, the mood of the subjects, the reason behind a particular phrase, the implications of an act. It is language animating itself through the reader.
Good writing is always pregnant with meaning. And that is why translation can feel so scary. Even after the nth review cycle, the question “did my translation do justice to the original?” will always remain. The answer is to not answer the question. Never answer this question. We don’t translate to do justice to the original. Translation by virtue is murder. A translator murders the original and gives it a rebirth. It is a creation on its own. The mighty responsibility of the translator is to ensure not only that all the information is conveyed but more importantly to ensure if the reader feels the same emotions in another language.
Like the red stains that remain after peeling a pomegranate, like the shadows of leaves rustling in the wind, like the fingerprints of our painted fingers, like the leftover shambles of a deserted nest, like the silver trail of a snail, the translation is simultaneously an inextricable part of the original and also an independent creation on its own. It is this dichotomy in the nature of translation that makes it wonderful. The fact that the same text translated by two people results in two different works means that we all inhabit language differently. The labour of translation involves considerable interpretation and research. The way one tastes free samples of ice cream to pick the best one, we explore and test a sentence to give out the best taste.
One of the major challenges I face when I translate a story or a novel is intention. We are all the products of our time and as a nod to the crisis of humanity we are living through, I have teetered a bit into the condition of human experience with respect to social media. In the era where AI is given reign to many of our cognitive faculties, we need to remember that only humans can create. AI. can spew a good or bad translation of a text, but it cannot give an intentionally good or bad translation.
The gap between information and authorship is widening, and we are witnessing an era where the distinction between producers and consumers is blurred to an extent where everyone is a producer and a consumer at the same time. The collapse of facts and opinions into ‘content’, and the resultant situation where anyone can spread information has led to the concerning situation where information is stripped of its authorship and gains power regardless of verification. Despite the positive impact of technology on decentralizing the power of conventional print media, we should note the dangerous implication here that creators are stripped from their work.
What happens when we strip authorship or legitimacy from content is that there is no one taking responsibility for the information or the consequence of its circulation. The corporate social media giants, while gaining bountiful profits from our usage of these platforms, have also completely refrained from taking the responsibility for the information that spreads on their platform and its consequences. This production without responsibility has given “information” independent authority, depriving us of agency and the algorithms that bend to the bias of who is in power.
So what do we do with content that is missing intention and meaning? How do we translate that which is hollow? Perhaps it is in the tensions that we find language. Perhaps it is when we let ourselves tarry with the gap within and between language, that we emerge as creators to find our agency in this struggle. This is when we can translate the folklore, fiction, poetry, and songs that have been so carefully crafted and gifted to us. This is how to create new registries of language, how we decolonize.
