Modlingua comes up with yet another surprise - this time, with Dr Jancy James, the first Vice-Chancellor of the Central University of Kerala and the first woman Vice-Chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University in a historic event where she explains the facet of translation as a bonding agent throughout cultures and traditions, education and religion, motivation and progression, and people and sentience.
Dr James provides a beautiful adjunct to Mr Kumar's concept of historically describing how translation can be ordained to be an integrative addendum towards nation building in his book "Role of Translation in Nation Building" (2012). He tries to disseminate this perspective as an instrumental and important global bridge in a totalistic configuration, as in an Actor-Network modality (Latour, Law and Callon, 1986).
Dr James, apart from being the first Vice-Chancellor of Kerala University, is an active linguist, an academician and a translator. Mr Kumar praises the excellence of her words, her wisdom and dedication towards explaining the immense power network that any language heralds, with the people abilifying it as a tool to the progressive interchange of senses at an intralinguistic level. Mr Kumar wishes to complement this fact with the calibrating of the Modlingua Community Learning Institution, a revolution in the existent linguistic interchange business.
Dr James begins by paying her respect to Prof Atul Kothari, Dr Braj Kishore, Dr Óscar Pujol Riembau (Director, Instituto Cervantes) and Mr Ravi Kumar, along with all the respected participants of the conference. She confesses humorously that she is never confused, even following the principle of Prof Kothari, that if she speaks in her native Malayalam most people will be unable to comprehend her, with a helpless Mr Kumar adding to the common sense intuition.
Dr James continues by affirming that translation has been hailed high in all varieties of communication, either directly through an agency or indirectly through a proxy. She brings up the idea of Dr Pujol in an interliterary talk where a transformation has been observed, motivated and proactivated in the translation-legion of the recent years. She describes the emerging role of the translator as it evolved from being a distance-creating traitor-mediator to an originator and transcreator towards strengthening a sociocognitive interconnective medium, acting as a bridge between the seedling and the branches of the tree of linguistics.
Hailing from the literary discipline, she proudly expresses her feelings as a translator, more so as a mother to intralinguism and the creation of an emotive-translative bond among all others, like the artist's expression of the earth beholding the mountains that are a part of it.
According to her, this symphony between translation and motherhood can be seen when the mother translates the adult's language to the baby through care and nurturing so that the latter grows up successfully in its ambiental social web. This is a very important aspect thoroughly explained in the art of socio-developmental psychology. Translation, here, is equivalent to the function of the circulating blood on the brain and body by proxy of ionic inter-transmission.
She states the fact of how the present environment is a tremendous difference to what existed even a decade past in translation, where it was merely a less functional additive to communication. Now, it is a vibrant necessity per se and is exigent to contribute to the peace process, as mentioned by His Excellency.
It is an irony, according to her, that our comprehension of a subjective global relationship negates the primal existence of a historic monarchy. She takes up the aspect of translation as a communicative tool to help us accept the role of the monarchy in shaping the democracy existent today, much toward which has been the magnificent role of translation and its fellow communication facilities. Translation is a positive, unifying agent which bonds people, nations, sources of knowledge and information while interpreting is the semantics of primary, secondary and tertiary lingual emotions.
As the founder-director of a centre for Comparative Literature, she highlights how translation subsumes linguistic and literary concepts and dissociates wide to include a category of genre studies. She says that translation should be studied as a profession to help identify its geometrics and angular dimensions which might as well be subjectively flexible due to sense-to-sense attributional variables in the achievement of target-source equivalency. This highlights the multitudinous issues that are a part of a translator's profession.
The question of untranslatables and the necessity of machine translation is of immense importance, according to Dr James, who proudly communicates the introduction of a new department of Linguistics and Language Technology at her university. The same has accelerated her knowledge on advanced linguistics to be used in framing the curriculum, by including teachers from both linguistic and nonlinguistic backgrounds, with special mention to those from disciplines like Computer Science. Dr James feels good to have as the faculty member a gentleman with a Doctorate in Language Technology from Ohio University, who also has a Masters in Linguistics from JNU, apart from having a B.Tech. from a university in Kerala. This person, according to Dr James, is an inevitable choice for the new department.
The idea of using translation as a tool is a vibrant, creative, and strong one in creating intersocietal and suprasegmental links which makes global information more accessible and reachable to the common people. Translation is also the adrenaline to many thought-provoking changes in lifestyle development. During several cultural celebrations in relation to Rabindranath Tagore in the past one year, Dr James looked up the translations of the Gitanjali in Malayalam, her mother-tongue, much in an impromptu spree. In all these, she discovered a sense of sans hailing from the Bible, prominently soaked in. When the Europeans arrived in India to fulfill their missionary zeal, their very aim of translating the Bible to vernacular was based on a much subtler approach to linguistic activity, predominated by an orthodox evangelistic faith. Many of these intruders were adept in Spanish, Latin, Portuguese and English languages. During their tenure in southern India, they made a good investigation of the possible uses of Malayalam, which acted as a major game changer in creating the Malayam sans which helped in the furtherance of Malayalam literature and prose. The latter has been described as "direct", "lyrical", "simple" and "heart-touching", abilified both in a sense of "being" and as a tool to help change percepts of the people in the delicate act of providing the tender touch to Malayalam prose.
In the Gitanjali, the sense of communion with God has been an inspiration as well as an impetus to this Malayalam transgeny.
All these various possibilities excite and reinvent an enlightened Dr James who steps out of the literary domain every time that she imagines and revisualizes its projective outlets.
The inevitability and ease of Machine Translation have deluded her in the situation where cultural untranslatables come in, where in certain instances she has spent days and nights at a stretch to find the more synonymous "sense-to-sense" twin of the source word in its target.
Machine Translation, she specifies, has several supportive and complementary elements, which is per se "a different world of expression". It includes pictures and graphs to enrich its process, which is a complement to interactive translation dictation. This will be very useful to individuals interested in translation, literature, technology and peace studies, as mentioned by His Excellency. The important point is of specifically synergizing MT with humans in a harmonic configuration of translation and localization. This will assist not only the translation of information but also the same in various other colours and expectations.
She profusely thanks Mr Kumar for the opportunity and idealizes introducing Spanish as a curriculum in her university with possibilities of a near future collaboration which would be a definite addendum to the existent department of Foreign Languages. She wishes a blooming success to the conference initiated by Mr Kumar and Dr Pujol and hopes that translation uncovers a long way in its process of diffusing peace and globalization of the nation - of people and emotions, and of traditions and senses.
