Understanding a nation through its linguistic and literary heritage is key to equal citizenship, identity, and soft power

As with any open-source living archive, its current data — 14,000-plus entries, 6500-plus authors, and 7000-plus translators — is a hypothesis that will be improved. But it will always be a work in progress — more river than ocean. It tries to answer questions like what is and what is not being translated, who is publishing translations, who is translating, which languages are most active, what are the most translated language pairs, and many more. It aims to understand our multilingual landscape: the dynamics between languages, the communities that use them, and the regions they belong to.

Today’s Bhashavaad data suggests the 125 translations in the first five decades of the 20th century leapt to 2673 in the first two decades of the 21st century. The top ten translated languages are Bengali (1749), Hindi (1155), and Marathi (887), followed by Tamil, Malayalam, Urdu, Telugu, Kannada, Sanskrit and Odia. The top five languages that receive translations outside English (half the story) are Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Bengali, and Telugu. A happy discovery of browsing is the long tail of translations from Manipuri, Maithili, Kodava, Rajbangshi, Mizo, Kokborok and Bongcher. The top languages for translation from Sanskrit are English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada and Punjabi.

The top publisher of translations is National Book Trust with 2260, closely followed by Sahitya Akademi with 2118. The most prolific translation publishers are Penguin in English, Vani Prakashan in Hindi, Gurjar Grantharatna in Gujarati, DC Books in Malayalam and Dey’s Publishing in Bengali. The top translated authors include Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Premchand, Amrita Pritam, William Shakespeare, Saadat Hasan Manto, Mahasweta Devi, Jules Verne and Satyajit Ray. The database throws up delightful translation heroes like Chandrakant Pokale (127 translations from Marathi to Kannada), Ramanlal Soni (83 translations from Bengali and seven from English to Gujarati), Sudhindranath Raha (65 translations from English and several European languages to Bengali) and Jai Ratan (36 translations from Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi to English).

Bhashavaad, like any database, is helpful but incomplete. However, it will improve as public users, authors and translators add new entries and correct existing ones. Publishers will soon have institutional interfaces to add or modify information. Collaborations with repositories of existing records are being explored, and data collection work continues from catalogues, websites and library lists. Most stakeholders in the literary world haven’t heard an appeal for shramdaan in a long time; Bhashavaad is it.

The most challenging and unravelled terrain is translations between Indian languages. Translations from Indian languages into English originated in the colonial period when Indologists such as William Jones and Moniere Williams tried to ‘unlock’ India’s secrets, which they believed (rather naively) existed in texts. Most were translations from Sanskrit into English. In the late 19th century, Indian languages started using Sanskrit and English to enrich themselves. However, translation between bhashas, say Marathi and Kannada, occurred between individuals, and their progress was uneven. Many of them were not documented because they lacked the support of an administration or publishing house. This bhasha-to-bhasha informal zone of information needs the most support.

Bhashavaad’s inventory will get more accurate with time but its goal is transforming our translation ecosystem. How do we get more translations for the long tail? Santali is the only of 22 Scheduled Indian Languages which doesn’t have a single translation into it listed in the database. How do we increase the translations within Indian languages? How do we get better matching for translators with authors and publishers? How do we improve book discovery and marketing mechanisms for translated books? What is the impact, if any, of tools offered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning on translation? What is needed for Indian writing in Indian languages to be accessible more widely within and outside India? These questions are complex but Indians have natural translation consciousness and must lead the world in translation theory, study and practice.

All knowledge endeavours involve translation, whether a historian’s interviews, an ecologist’s field visits or a critic’s reading of cinema. The excellent movie Arrival chronicles the iterative translation process between two humans and aliens who use body language, technology and sign language to discover how to communicate their intentions to each other. The parallels of that movie with the subtle distinctions made by Professor Sundar Sarukkai at the first Bhashavaad conference last year between World vs Word, Word vs Meaning and Touch vs Contact are immense. Understanding a nation through its linguistic and literary heritage is key to equal citizenship, identity, and soft power. India’s translation ecosystem is ready to help by moving to the next orbit.