NEP 2020, NTM, and Indian Languages in Higher Education

Language region maps of India. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Language_region_maps_of_India.svg (Filpro / CC BY-SA)

 

 

The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) (PDF) makes several recommendations for education in Indian languages. The 60-page document's recommendations for languages in school education are being discussed quite a lot in the media. In the English media, "Why is India obsessed with English-medium education – when it goes against scientific consensus?", by Shoaib Daniyal, is a sensible look at the current debate, and points to several studies worldwide to make its arguments.

However, this post is about the National Translation Mission (NTM), which is already addressing several of the Policy's recommendations for Higher Education Institutes (HEIs). The Policy observes:

22.7. For languages to remain relevant and vibrant, there must be a steady stream of high-quality learning and print materials in these languages – including textbooks, workbooks, videos, plays, poems, novels, magazines etc. Languages must also have consistent official updates to their vocabularies and dictionaries, widely disseminated so that the most current issues and concepts can be effectively discussed in these languages. Enabling such learning materials, print materials, and translations of important materials from world languages, and constantly updating vocabularies has to become a national priority. (pp. 52-53)

NTM is seriously engaging with a part of this "national priority". Here is a list of the 69 "chief domains" in which NTM has identified "knowledge texts". As their website notes: "All prescribed text books, reference books and articles that are considered foundational in any discipline of college / university education are included for translation. Specific attention is given to the disciplines of Natural Sciences and Social Sciences." The result is a list that currently ranges, alphabetically, from "Adult / Continuing Education" and "Anthropology", through "Linguistics" and "Management", to "Women's Studies" and "Zoology (General)".

To create a network of translators for such a massive project, NTM has been conducting regular Translator Education programmes – currently on hold because of COVID-19.  Here is what their Translator Education page says:

Translator Education Programme of NTM primarily aims to orient the translator towards the translation of knowledge texts. It also offers academic support to those who are willing to take up translation as their profession. It orients translators about the history and tradition of translation in India, problems and challenges in knowledge text translation in Indian Languages and how to use translation tools such as dictionaries, glossaries and thesaurus. It also intends to prepare versatile and efficient professional translators. To achieve the said goal, NTM conducts events like Workshops, Orientation Programmes and Seminars. Translation Today (NTM′s biannual journal), Handbook for Translators, AV materials produced by NTM Media and NTM′s Course Materials would act as apparatus in educating translators.

Thus, NTM is already performing some of the functions envisaged in NEP 2020 for the "proposed Indian Institute of Translation and Interpretation" (p. 53).

Nor is all this somewhere in the future! Here is NTM's 2018-2019 Catalogue of 63 translations already published and available – in India's 22 Official Languages! A few examples of what is already available in their catalogue:

• Dogri, Telugu: An Introduction to the Study of Indian History by D. D. Kosambi
  
• Hindi: Abnormal Psychology by Carson et al.
• Kannada, Maithili: Fundamentals of Molecular Spectroscopy by Banwell and McCash
• Kannada, Marathi: Heat Transfer by J. P. Holman
• Malayalam: Principles of Mathematical Analysis by W. Rudin
• Bodo, Urdu: The Penguin History of Early India from the origins to AD 1300 by Romila Thapar

And here's a list of "Shortlisted Books for Translation". There are many more fascinating details: see NTM's Detailed Project Report. Further, appropriately enough for a project addressing India's multilingualism, the NTM website is available not only in English, but in all the other 22 Official Languages as well!

On a smaller scale, such systematic translation projects are going on in other places as well – at Azim Premji University, for example. As details become available, we will blog about those too.

However, as this post shows, there is much to learn from this National Translation Mission project to keep our languages "relevant and vibrant".

Esperanto and the translation scene

Photo credit: Yûiti Sawaya‎

The recent launch of the Esperanto volume Vjetnama Antologio (Vietnamese Anthology; details below) is a welcome addition to the diversity of Esperanto literature in translation. Abel Montagut, in a 2004 study, concluded that between 1957 and 1966 in the Esperanto world, English, Russian, French, and German (the "Big Four") accounted for only 30% of the source languages; 70% of the translations into Esperanto were from other languages. In sharp contrast, these Big Four accounted for 70% of the source languages in the UNESCO database Index Translationum. 

This prompted me to have a quick look at other parts of the world. A June 2019 article by Dan Kopf celebrates that, "in 2018, 632 never-before-translated books of fiction and poetry were published in the United States. It’s the fifth straight year the US has published more than 600 translations". Moreover, as Chad Post notes, "the number of original works of fiction and poetry published annually in the US expanded from roughly 360 in 2008 to more than 600 in recent years. That may not seem like a lot, but a 67% increase over a decade is no fluke."

But Gabriella Page-Fort puts that into perspective: this is 632 out of an estimated 30 000 new books published in the US every year -- that's less that 1%! Indeed, Post mentions the 2005 study which "announced that less than 3% of all the books [not just literary fiction and poetry] published in English [in the United States] were originally written in another language". (And hence his international literature resource, "Three Percent".)

Besides, Kopf tells us, "Of the nearly 5800 books of fiction and poetry translated from 2008 to 2018, more than half were from just nine countries, seven of which are in Europe (the exceptions are Japan and China). Over 10% of books were originally published in France alone. Over that same period, only one book each was translated from Benin, Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar, Mali, and Myanmar." No Vietnam there, incidentally! (The data comes from the Publishers Weekly database.) The Big Four in the US were French, German, Spanish, and Italian. (In that 2006-photo of my poetry bookshelf, the books are in English, Esperanto, Hindi, and translations from French, Greek, Persian, Sanskrit, and Urdu.)

The situation with German is much better. "German publishers, for example, bought translation rights to 3782 American books in 2002, while American publishers bought rights for only 150 German books," Stephen Kinzer informs us. The situation has only improved since then, notes Page-Fort: "in 2016, 9882 new translations were published in Germany, 13.6% of new releases".

These observers of the translation scene offer a familiar list of reasons for the situation. Here's Post's one-paragraph summary: "economic censorship (translations don’t make profits, so corporations don’t bother with them), they spiral out to a host of intertwined cultural issues: Editors don’t read foreign languages; it doesn’t pay to fund a translator as well as an author; corporate consolidation has made it harder to publish books that sell modestly; indie presses can’t afford to market the foreign titles they do publish; American readers “yawn” at translations, and so bookstores don’t stock them and reviewers (or the handful that have survived the newspaper die-off) don’t review them. The more you look at it, the more the “problem” begins to feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy."

But, as Page-Fort notes: "These dire statistics are focused only on the number of translations published, but demand for international books forces a shift. In China, the top five bestselling fiction books of 2017 were translations (including works by Japan’s Keigo Higashino and Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini); compare that to the US top five, who were all American, save for Canadian Margaret Atwood. We, the readers, have the power to change this trend."

Post offers another perspective. "If there are a few thousand above-average titles to choose from every year [from the world's languages], why not choose the ones that people will be debating and discussing decades from now, instead of the immediate successes?"

Let me end with Page-Fort again (and with a 2017-photo of five books from my poetry shelf.): "It is easy for me to imagine a more compassionate world, a place where education brings people together and empowers us to find one another through the arts. I would like to think that globalization will lead us toward a new cultural unity; a world where books are as unique as the people who write them and readers are drawn together through stories, beyond the borders of language or country."

I'm glad to see that the world Esperanto movement is playing a role here!

Vjetnama Antologio (2019), edited by Nguyen Thi Phuong Mai and Luon Ngoc Bao, was launched during the 9th Asian-Oceanian Congress of Esperanto in Danang, Vietnam (25-28 April 2019). The book is 14.5 x 20.5 cm, and has 386 pages. Price: 350 VND (about 15 EUR). Cover Photo credit: Yûiti Sawaya‎

Translating literature using Esperanto

In Kolkata, on 29 January, there was a book launch of children's books translated into Bangla from three European languages, as well as a Bangla children's novel translated into those three languages. The translators used Esperanto as a bridge language for this project. The three books, published by Samtat Sanstha, are part of a 4-country project  called "One Indian children's book in Europe - three European children's books in India", funded by the European Commission. The project has several partners and sponsors.

The books are the Bangla translations of: the Italian novel Diary of Jochjo Tempesto by Vamba; the Slovenian short-story collection I wanted to touch the sun by Tone Partljič, and the Croatian novel Wakajtapu by Joža Horvat. For their part, the partners translated (using an Esperanto translation) the Bangla novel Life of Damaru by Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay.

Probal Dasgupta, the Indian coordinator of the project, has a more detailed report on the launch and the project in a post on the Esperanto discussion list Landa-Agado.