New Centre for Translations Inaugurated in New Delhi (India)
St Stephen's College in Delhi opened a Centre for Translations with an unusually plain mandate: move academic texts and books of cultural importance between India's vernacular languages and the languages of the wider world. In a country with twenty-two scheduled languages and a publishing industry that mostly ignores the traffic between them, that is a larger project than it sounds.
What the centre set out to do
The initiative came from the college principal, Valson Thampu, and drew in professors and alumni to run its first translation projects. The plan included a taught course on translation, introduced in July of its first year, and it was opened to applicants from outside Delhi University, most likely as a diploma. That last detail matters more than it appears. Translation in India has long been something people do rather than something people are trained to do, and a formal qualification changes who enters the field.
The gap the centre was aiming at
India produces literature in dozens of languages and translates remarkably little of it internally. A novel that is celebrated in Malayalam may never appear in Bengali. A Marathi poet can be entirely unknown to a Tamil reader. English frequently acts as the bridge, which means a text often travels from one Indian language to another by way of a third language spoken by a minority of the population.
Academic material has the same problem, with higher stakes. Teaching in the vernacular is national policy in much of the country, but the textbooks, the research and the reference works are overwhelmingly in English. A student in a state university studying in Hindi or Odia frequently has to switch languages to read the material their course is based on, which is a barrier disguised as a curriculum.
Translating academic texts is its own discipline
Rendering a philosophy monograph or a scientific textbook into a language whose academic vocabulary is still being built is not the same job as translating a novel. Terminology has to be coined, and once coined it has to be adopted consistently, or the next translator will invent a different word for the same concept and the field will fragment.
This is why institutional centres matter. An individual translator can produce a good book. Only an institution can maintain a glossary, train successors and enforce the consistency that turns a set of translations into a usable body of knowledge. Professional hindi translation services working in technical fields face exactly the same problem in the commercial market, and solve it the same way, with terminology databases rather than talent alone.
Why cultural texts were included
The centre's remit covered books of cultural importance as well as academic ones, which is the more ambitious half of the brief. Cultural translation carries the risk of flattening what makes a text worth reading. Registers of respect, caste and kinship that are carried by a single verb form in one Indian language may have no equivalent in another, and English tends to erase them entirely.
Translators working on this material develop strategies rather than solutions. Some retain the original term and let context carry it. Some add a glossary. Some rewrite the sentence so the relationship is shown rather than named. What none of them can do is pretend the difficulty is not there, and readers notice when they try.
The economics have not changed
The obstacle to Indian literary translation has never been talent. It is money. Translating a full-length work takes months, publishers pay poorly for it, and the market for a translated Kannada novel in Hindi is small enough that few houses will underwrite the risk. University centres exist partly to absorb that cost, because a salaried academic translating in institutional time is not depending on royalties.
Public funding has moved in the same direction, and the results are visible. When the International Booker Prize went to a novel translated from Hindi, the immediate effect was a scramble for rights to other Indian-language fiction, which is what happens every time a translation succeeds commercially. Interest follows evidence, never the other way round.
What a translation course actually teaches
The most useful thing a diploma course can do is disabuse students of the idea that fluency is qualification. The skills that separate a working translator from a bilingual person are unglamorous: reading closely enough to notice what the author is doing, writing well enough to do it again in another language, researching terminology, negotiating a contract, and knowing when to refuse a job.
Communities of translators discussing the trade, including in forums such as r/india and the professional groups around it, come back repeatedly to the same complaint: the work is invisible, and invisibility keeps the rates low. Training does not fix that on its own, but it produces practitioners who can argue for their value.
The long view
A single college centre will not rebalance the traffic between India's languages. What it can do is train the people who might, and add to the slow accumulation of translated texts that eventually makes a literature visible outside its own language. That accumulation is how every literary culture has travelled, and it has always been the work of institutions willing to fund something that does not pay for itself in the first decade.