The Role of Translation Studies in India Today

Webinar with Dr. Jagdish Sharma and Ravi Kumar - summary by Drishti Jain

Language is never static, and translation in India has always been an evolving discipline. In this webinar, held under the guidance of Dr. Jagdish Sharma, Modlingua founder Ravi Kumar traces the history of translation studies in India and what the field means today - both as interlingual transfer and as intercultural communication.

Kumar illustrates the idea with anthropology: the anthropologist observes a culture, its people, language and habits, then "translates" that understanding for others. Translators do the same - which is why they are sometimes called manipulators, in the best sense: they carry not just words but an entire culture and its traditions across to a new audience.

Dr. Sharma picks up the thread with the Indian context. In the mid-nineteenth century, "imagining a nation" out of a multilingual, multiethnic society made translation an urgent intellectual question - a cultural necessity for orientalist, nationalistic and ideological projects, while the Eurocentric idea of a nation as a single-language unit never fit India. The late 1980s and 1990s then became an exciting period for Indian translation studies, as work moved largely between Sanskrit sources and English targets and the discipline found its academic footing.

For anyone studying or practicing translation in India - across Indian and foreign languages with English - this session is a compact introduction to where the discipline came from and why it matters now.