Touching the untouched: Sundar Sarukkai on translation and language

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The modern discipline of translation studies is often traced back to the preoccupations of biblical studies, specifically the problem of translating the book of god into human languages. This particular formulation of translation has had an unfortunate and unforgiving influence on the way we continue to understand the activity of translation. It is based on the fundamental presupposition that there is a given original, and the translation of that original is never adequate. The definition of the original is itself defined in such a way that the translation can never achieve unity with it. By definition, there is an unbridgeable gap between the original text and the translated one, which mimics the unbridgeable gap between the divine and the human. The original is always unreachable, untouchable.

Such a view continues its hold over centuries only because of certain assumptions about the nature of language. As much as they were based on the belief of an unerasable difference between two kinds of beings, they were also the reason for this continued distance between the original and the translation. This act of producing an artificial gap/chasm between the language of the gods and that of humans naturally leads to a chasm between human languages,...

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