On 3rd January 2022 we had a workshop on translation study at the department of English MKBU. We have a paper in our syllabus of : Comparative Literature and Translation Studies so this workshop is helpful to us to understand more in this field. Our guest speaker Vishal Bhadani sir tells us about his love story with translation.
Dr Vishal Bhadani Sir gained 5 years of teaching experience from the leading universities of Gujarat, now he works as a Director, International Center for Applied Gandhian Studies, Lokbharti Sanosara which is the first residential institute of rural higher education in the country. He translated Dhruv Bhatt's two Gujarati novels into English.
Timirpanthi as The Pilgrims of Darkness
Akoopar as The Blue Marble
Learning outcome :-
1) Has your understanding of translation improved?
Yes, In the first session sir gave us examples of different approaches to translation. What are your ways of looking at translation that sir explained and what are the possibilities as translator that we understood after this session. And the second session was about practical translation in which sir gave us some exercise. We learn, as Gayatri Spivak said,
"Translation is the closest reading of text".
Before this workshop I didn't even know that there were lots of possibilities of work in the field of translation. People have several myths about translation like,
Untranslatability
Translation is a small industry
Most translators translate book
Machine translation is crushing the demand for human translation
Translation is either beautiful or faithful.
So these are all myths, there is scope in the translation field, machines can not translate regional words. So my understanding of translation has improved.
2) Can you write about translation in terms of metaphors?
Yes, we can take examples of metaphors from nature, mythology, epic, culture, music. The first example is from nature,
1] The Moon :- The moon's calmness is the translation of the sun's light.
2] Ganesha's head :- to put the similar thing instead of the original; it means we can use the similar words in place of the original words. That looks similar to the original.
3] Kevat :- We know that famous scene of Rama and Kevat.
So Rama is a text and that woman is a dictionary. It means while translating you need the help of a dictionary.
4] Western - Eastern Culture :- Exchange of one another's culture.
3) What according to you is the most difficult aspect of practical translation?
During the translation the question that arises in our mind and sir also explained the question about translation is that, Google also provides translation, there are also apps available so what is the need of human translators ??? The answer sir gave is,
- machines crushes the meaning of some regional words
- they are not giving proper meaning of some words sometimes
Sir gave us one sentence to translate is : મા તે મા બીજા વગડાના વા ! (તમે પણ પ્રયત્ન કરજો 😄, શું આવે છે કેજો). Google translator gave us this sentence : Ma te ma bija vagada va !!!.
So here we need a human translator !!! It is the difficult part of translation when we translate the regional words.
4) learning outcome from the workshop :-
Doing translation is not an easy task. You have to be very careful while translating, because one wrong word can change the whole meaning. The other thing that I learned from the session is that you have to use dictionaries while translating. A good translator is also a good traveller. You have to observe the things around you so you can use it in your work.
Overall it was amazing. We enjoyed the whole session 🤩. Here are some glimpses :-
