On Translation (An Old and Rare Book)

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The art of translation is as creative as any other genre of creative writing. It is bound to continue to play a significantly cementing role in a strife-torn world of ours, where language happens to be a challenging barrer still. It is a dependable window on the outside realms of literary, cultural, aesthetic effort and achievement on the part of man. It alone ensures cross fertilization of values right across the barrier of languages.

Translation is on the one hand a skill, a craft, a discipline and on the other a tool of interpretation. Juliane House says, "Translation is the replacement of a text in the source language by a semantically and pragmatically equivalent text in the target languages. "This establishes once again the time-proven fact that translation is transcreation of the mood and message of a text in the target language, thereby assuring it a parallel co existence. In order to critically analyse and focus light on the various aspects of the problems involved in the task of creative translation the International Institute of Tamil Studies, Chennai, conducted a National Seminar "On Translation" sponsored by the University Grants Commission from 24th to 26th of February 1999.

Scholars of repute had been invited to present their papers on Translation with particular emphasis on the following aspects: Translation of Literature, Translation of works of science and Technology and Problems and Techniques of translation. The first section, Translation of literature consists of papers analysing the already existing bulk of translations from Tamil into English and other languages and from English into Tamil. The second section on translation of works of science and Technology threw light on translations from the areas of Basic Science, Medicine, Engineering and other related works. The third section deals with the problems and techniques of translation with an accent on the problems faced by the translators translating from Tamil into English and from Tamil into other languages. Attempts have also been made to highlight the latest techniques adopted for text translation.

About sixty scholars responded to our invitation and participated in the Seminar, but only thirty-nine scholars responded in time. I thank them all for their contributions and having chaired the sessions.

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