Nataly Kelly, Jost Zetzsche
Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World
270 pp. Perigee Books. Paperback.
Rs. 966.  ISBN:978-0-39953-7974

Translation and interpretation, to quote an anonymous interpreter from Jost Zetzsche and Nataly Kelly’s book “Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World”, is an ‘underappreciated’ work. The authors have done a brilliant attempt in this book to give translation and interpretation its proper place in the field of human communication. Translation makes the world communicate. Language affects each and every aspect of our lives in some form or the other through translation and interpretation. Consciously or unconsciously, we are helped, rescued, entertained, loved, informed and delighted continuously by the process of translation.

Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetzsche tell us interesting stories as to how translation and interpretation touch every facet of human life from healthcare and disaster management to business and commerce to entertainment, religion and technological advancement in times of war and peace. The authors have illustrated their points with interesting anecdotes which they painstakingly collected after interviewing translators and interpreters (both professional and amateur) from different corners of the globe. These include a ninety-one year old man who interpreted for Nazi war criminals during the Nuremburg trials, an Inuit in Arctic and a University Professor in New Zealand working for the preservation of Maori language.

In entertainingly told stories, we come to know how wrong translation or misinterpretation of a word or a phrase or an expression can sometimes spell disaster or cost very dearly and sometimes even create laughter. The authors have been successful in bringing to light how translation plays a vital role even in our daily lives, in big and small ways we can’t even imagine. There are long and hard (and often unappreciated or underappreciated )efforts of translators and/or interpreters when you can draw money from an ATM machine with options in your own language, surf or search the internet or read newspaper online in your own language, choose from a McDonald’s menu card printed in the local language or communicate some chronic ailment to an expert physician who doesn’t speak your tongue. Translation has played the key role in making the internet and the e-commerce go truly global and become the sensational phenomenon that they have become. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Linked In, TED – all have had an enormous outreach to people across the globe changing their lives forever while taking their own revenues to unprecedented heights.

Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetzsche have been successful in making us realize how difficult this job can be and how vital it is for all sorts of cross cultural communication across the world. But at the same time we also realize that translation and interpretation has also been a thankless job. However, it is a great asset, a great tool to possess. We read in this book many accounts of the people for whom being multilingual proved to be a gateway for shining career that they love and enjoy. We also read towards the end of the book, an interesting discussion on the future of human translation and machine translation. The authors quote the futurist Ray Kurzweil to conclude that machine translation needs and will need human efforts to grow in terms of perfection and maturity and can never be a full or even a major substitute of human translators and interpreters.

When the authors asked their interviewees to describe their job in one word, one of them chose the word ‘underappreciated’. The authors want their book to change this opinion one reader at a time. Well, I have changed mine. In all, it is an entertaining and refreshing read.