Culture

Babel Everywhere: How Translation Drives the World

Posted by

0





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. Continue reading →

			

	
		
	


				
					


	
	

		
The Theory and the Practice: A Notion of Criticism for Our Age


				

			Posted by 		

		
				
0

			


		

		
[I had written this article sometime ago to plead for a more accessible and simpler approach to literary criticism. ]


The role of imaginative literature in the process of human existence, the relationship between literature and society, and the utility of literary and cultural criticism to the society and to literature itself have been topics of hot and provoking debates since Plato and Aristotle, to the present day. These topics have always been discussed evaluated and re-evaluated with utmost zeal and energy by critical thinkers and litterateurs of high caliber, repeatedly over the ages and yet they have remained questions of immortal significance- every age re-evaluating these topics to formulate its own notions of creation and criticism for its own good.


The study of literature as well as the practice of literary criticism today, has become too much academic and jargon-ridden and the need to formulate proper notions of the study and criticism of literature is greater today than it ever was. This obviously calls, for a serious rethinking of the function and purpose of literary criticism, proper and fit for our age – the age of visual media and digital culture. Continue reading →