The work of translator is, by and large, considered to be a mechanical activity which does not require much creative skill. It is considered that a translator does not contribute anything new to what has already been said in one language but merely replaces the lexical items of one language by those of another.
As a result a translator's job enjoys much less prestige than that of a creative author. This general attitude towards the translators is reflected in the appointments of translators in many public sector offices. The only important qualification of a translator is that he should have an average working knowledge of the two languages English and Hindi. All the government offices, because of government policy, need a person who can take care of the Hindi translations of the English texts but most of these offices do not even have a regular post of a Hindi officer (Indian Railways is the only central government organization which has a fullfledged Hindi office with a number of Hindi officers and their assistants) or even if they have the post either it is not filed or is filled by a person who is not properly qualified for a translator's work. A Master's degree in Hindi literature does not train one to be a good translator. Many institutes assign the responsibility to any individual who is a native speaker of Hindi and has studied English upto a certain level.
Translation involves far more than a working knowledge of the two languages. Levy (1963) aptly points it out as follows: "A translation is not a monistic composition, but an interpenetration and conglomerate of two structures. On the one hand there are the semantic contents and the formal contours of the original, on the other hand the entire system of aesthetic features is bound up with the language of the translation" (Levy 1963, Umeniprekladu, cited in J. Holmes 1970). Most of the translators in government offices are 'amateur' translators, "whose object in translating has more to do with circulating the contents of a given work than with exploring the formal properties of the text" (Bassnett-McGuire 1980, a feature described in a colonial context, which still holds true in India). Because of this general attitude, functioning in most of the translator's cells in most government offices in such that even good translators are forced to "self-denial and repression of their own creative impulses" (Bassnett-McGuire 1980, 30). Since "Translation involves far more than replacement of lexical and grammatical items between languages" (Bassnett-McGuire 1980, 25), a translator becomes a major factor for a good piece of translation and if this factor is weak then we cannot expect to achieve high quality in the translated piece. The recent theories of translation studies consider translation as a process rather than a product. Therefore, it is important to see how a translated piece has developed rather than what the end result is like. |
