By Neha Galhotra

Transcribed in July 2018 during the author's Modlingua internship, from the Modlingua Live recording of Dr. Anita Bhatnagar Jain's address at a Modlingua conference on the translation industry. Official titles and programme details are as stated at the time of the talk.

Source video: Watch the talk on Modlingua Live (YouTube)

Ravi Kumar (Founder and Managing Director, Modlingua) introduces the speaker: I would like to request Dr. Anita Bhatnagar Jain, who has been our source of inspiration for this conference and perhaps for future conferences as well, and who is currently heading the National Translation Mission as well as serving as Joint Secretary of Higher Education and Languages in the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. Her views and thoughts could be of great help to us. May I request ma'am to please come on the dais. Thank you!

A Country of Diversities

Good afternoon everybody, or shall I say good evening, and Namaskar. I had the option of speaking right after the lighting of the lamp, but I requested Ravi Kumar Ji that I would like to listen and learn from what the other speakers had to say. I am extremely privileged and honoured to get this opportunity to share my thoughts with you, based on my limited experience.

The speakers before me have already spoken about the tapestry of our country, the diversity. Let me share this with you: initially, I took this diversity for granted. I never thought it was a distinctive feature of our country until I went to places where they did not have so much of it. We are a country of diversities in every sphere - racial diversity, linguistic diversity which I will come to later, caste diversity, and religious diversity. The very fact of our openness can be gauged from this: in Hinduism, we recognise that there are around 300 million gods and goddesses, and every village and tribe has the option of its own deity being recognised. That speaks about openness, because ultimately we will have diversity only if we are open and accommodative.

We have classical languages - Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada - with a separate definition given by the Government of India regarding their antiquity and literature, and how different classical literature is from the modern literature in those languages. The Government of India is not only dealing with these various languages; we also have the English and Foreign Languages University, foreign languages being taught in various universities, and a plethora of demands to set up centres for teaching languages, especially English, in countries all across the world - a demand we are not able to fully meet because it is so huge.

You might be aware that we have a three-language formula in the schools. Very recently, the Government of Sri Lanka approached the Government of India to assist them with their ten-year master plan: how to move Sri Lankan society towards a trilingual society with Tamil, Sinhala and English. It is exciting to know how much can be done. Ultimately, when we develop languages, only then are we going to keep them alive, communicate, build up a society and strive towards a harmonious society.

Just last week, I was in Brussels to address the European Parliament on sustaining diversity. Our experience is very different: we are a huge country with so many languages; their experience is of so many countries, which means the task is much more difficult. There, it is even being questioned whether diversity is good or whether diversity divides people. There are various sides to the same perspective.

The National Translation Mission

I would like to brief you a little about the National Translation Mission, because everybody gathered here is in some way associated with translation. The National Translation Mission is a flagship programme under the National Knowledge Commission. The biggest challenge before our country is how to convert our population into an advantage: by 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years. We will have a young population, but unless these massive numbers are educated appropriately - and by education I do not mean only literacy, but also employability, because the bottom line anywhere is employability - everything fizzles out.

In our country, the states are organised more or less on a linguistic basis, and the English-speaking population is a minuscule minority. Especially in the rural areas, people know their own regional language, not English. The National Translation Mission aims at translating knowledge texts into the various scheduled languages. This is a very complex task because of the number of languages involved. We aim to translate books in around 69 disciplines into our 22 scheduled languages, for which we have done a massive survey across the country - looking at university syllabi, at which books should be taken up, and in which languages.

This project is going to change the socio-economic and cultural scenario of the country, because children will have books available in their own language. At present, most books, especially in the urban sector, are available in English, and a person who does not know English is at a handicap. And translation itself is not simple: speaking to a machine is very different, and as was mentioned earlier, what a person wants to convey ultimately depends on the translator - whether you make it or you mar it. That is a very big challenge in front of us as we move ahead with this project.

Challenges Facing India's Languages

I would also like to say that we have lots of challenges; this is not a rosy picture. As far as languages are concerned, the biggest problems are the ones all of us know: globalization, urbanization, migration, and the breaking up of families into nuclear families. There is the economic factor - the achiever languages versus the endangered languages, the languages which have economic and political power behind them. All these issues make it a very complex task, not only how to sustain and keep these languages alive, but also how to keep the purity of the languages alive while everything around us is dynamic and changing.

Keeping Languages Alive

Frankly speaking, when Ravi Ji invited me for this occasion, I did not know what to expect, but after a small chat with him I became very excited, and I was so happy to know that there is so much going on and so much will be achieved by this conference. In a way it is my loss, because I did not want to speak from the podium - I wanted to be part of the audience, learning from the various countries what exactly you are doing and how we can learn from those practices. A very important issue raised here was the regulation of the translation industry and norms for good translation. Whatever recommendations emerge out of this conference, and especially the practices from the various countries, I would be very grateful if they could later be shared with the Ministry. We will try to think of a strategy for how we, as a Ministry and as a Government of India department, can assist this sector.

Whenever we speak of languages and keeping them alive - not only documenting them but keeping them alive - the responsibility lies with us, with each one of us, wherever we are. We have to keep languages alive in our families; that is the only way to keep them alive. Governments and policies alone will not do it - they will remain on paper. Everybody needs jobs and everybody wants to learn English, but we must also have a sense of identity and self-respect for one's own language.

I would like to close with a quote that touched my heart: "Yes, we are different, we speak different languages, we have different mannerisms, we eat different food, but yet we are not that different that we cannot get along together." So it is a salute to diversity, and a salute to unity, when we are here together to speak of the future of the translation industry. I would like to say: not only the role of translation in nation building, but the role of translation in building an international global community - a harmonious, peaceful, beautiful Earth. Thank you very much! Jai Hind!