NEWS

A NOVEL MOVEMENT IN FAVOR OF INDIAN LANGUAGES

"Saar Sansaar" in collaboration with "Swatantara Varta", a Hindi daily being published simultaneously from Hyderabad, Vishakhapatnam and Nizamabad, has started a movement in India, which will go a long way in making available selected exciting texts from different languages to readers in all the languages of India. Since independence and much before that English has played the role of the intermediary language for translation of foreign languages literatures in India, which meant that the Indian readers could read only that literature, which was published in UK or USA, in English, or, if they are fortunate, in their mother tongue.

In the last 9 years 'Saar Sansaar' has published foreign literatures translated directly into Hindi without the filter of English, sometimes publishing texts which were not published even in the original language. The process of replacing English as the filter language had started in these years; some of the texts published in 'Saar Sansaar' have already been translated into Telugu, Urdu and Punjabi. And why not? After all the translation from an Indian language into another Indian language will be more authentic, owing to linguistic and cultural affinity among all the Indian languages.

Now, when entering the 10th year of its publication 'Saar Sansaar is institutionalizing this process by giving it a concrete direction. 'Swatantara Varta' will be publishing every Sunday, for one year, an Austrian or Swiss story/poem/essay exhorting its readers, who include a fair number of writers and translators from other languages, to translate any of these texts into their mother tongue and publish the same in a magazine publishing literature in their mother tongue. Hyderabad is a melting pot of Indian languages, where 5 languages, viz. Telugu, Urdu, Hindi, Kannada and Marathi are spoken by a large segment of population, while many other communities have made Hyderabad their home in large numbers.

Apart from becoming a partner in this noble movement of promoting Hindi as an intermediary language for translation of foreign language literatures, the 'Swatantara Varta' has announced cash prizes and citations/certificates for best translations in each Indian language.

The first year will be devoted to Swiss and Austrian literatures, where focus will be on eminent modern authors like Karl-Markus Gauss, Zdenka Becker, Marianne Gruber, Erwin Riess, Andreas Weber and Margit Schreiner (Austria), and Franz Hohler and Rudolf Peyer (Switzerland), who are likely to visit India in near future. The translators will also be provided an opportunity to recite the translated texts along with the writers of the original, when they would be on a visit to India.

This movement has started on 26th December, 2004. The first text with the exhortation to the translators of other Indian languages has already appeared in the Sunday Edition of 'Swatantra Varta' on this date.

It could have been a record of sorts anywhere in the world. "Saar Sansaar" has intoruduced 51 new translators, who translate directly from their source language into Hindi. The following is a list of the translators introduced by us: