‘Translators need to employ the craft of fiction writing to do their work well’: Srinath Perur

‘The time I spent on writing fiction has proved enormously rewarding. It helps me as a reader, a narrative nonfiction writer, and yes, a translator.’

Sayari Debnath

· Nov 26, 2023 · 08:30 am

‘Translating women writers enables their cultural positions to be represented’: Alo Shome

An interview with translator Alo Shome about her newly published translation of Nirupama Devi’s 1915 Bengali novel ‘Didi’.

Veeksha Vagmita

· Sep 09, 2023 · 07:30 am

‘I find the constraints of the original text liberating to work with’: Translator Rahul Soni

‘A translator must be at least as good a writer in his or her language, and in the same ways, as the author of the original is in his or hers.’

Sayari Debnath

· Jul 08, 2023 · 05:30 pm

‘The match between a translator and a writer is alchemical. It’s like being married’: Anton Hur

‘I plan to continue to be a bidirectional translator. I’m already a bilingual author. No one told me I couldn’t do it, so I just went ahead and did it.’

Sayari Debnath

· Jun 10, 2023 · 05:30 pm

‘The quest for the ultimate ‘Mahabharata’ is madness. It is not there’: Translator Wendy Doniger

‘‘Mahabharata’ has no single answer to anything at all. There are several answers, sometimes contradictory. That’s the complexity of the text.’

Avik Chanda

· May 07, 2023 · 08:30 am

‘A challenge of translating from Rajasthani is to keep its orality alive in English’: Vishes Kothari

‘I can’t help but marvel at how Rajasthani is thriving outside urban centres. The huge adoption of the language on social media is particularly heartening.’

Sayari Debnath

· May 06, 2023 · 08:30 am

‘My intention is to be as authentic as possible to what Veda Vyasa said’: Translator Bibek Debroy

‘Prose came into Sanskrit literature much later. When we think of poetry, often we tend to think of rhyming. Sanskrit poetry was not like that.’

Avik Chanda

· Apr 01, 2023 · 09:20 am

‘Confining a language to a nationality is narrow-minded’: JCB-Prize-winning translator Baran Farooqi

‘The current trend is to dismiss Urdu as a version of Hindi. There is a mass pretence of it being a foreign, an exotic tongue, but that is not true at all.’

Sayari Debnath

· Feb 19, 2023 · 07:30 am

‘Thrice marginalised’: Writer Nazia Akhtar on Urdu women writers of Hyderabad

An interview with Nazia Akhtar, the author of ‘Bibi’s Room: Hyderabadi Women and Twentieth-Century Urdu Prose.’

Mallik Thatipalli

· Nov 26, 2022 · 05:30 pm

Kathryn Hansen: ‘Even knowing one South Asian language very well is not enough to translate’

An interview with translator and South Asia specialist Kathryn Hansen.

Suzanne L Schulz

· Jul 16, 2022 · 08:30 am

How Ananda Lal translated Utpal Dutt’s 50-year-old political play ‘Barricade’ into English

‘Dutt felt that 1933 Germany was being repeated in 1970s Kolkata, and exactly 50 years later, what he wrote resonates for us again.’

Ramu Ramanathan

· Apr 03, 2022 · 12:30 pm

Arunava Sinha wins Distinguished Translator Award 2022 at Jaipur Literature Festival

Sinha, the co-director of Ashoka Centre of Translation, has translated over 70 books.

Scroll Staff

· Mar 13, 2022 · 04:38 pm