Dr. Hephzibah Israel: Translating for Promotion: the Civil Servant, the Missionary and the Pundit
Date: Wednesday September 26, 2018
Time: 4-5.30pm
Venue: Room 1.06 or Project Room, 50 George Square EH8 9LH
Abstract:
Can the ability to translate between languages have weightier cultural consequences than career progression? My talk examines the significance of the introduction of translation for pedagogical purposes in colonial India. Despite a complex multi-lingual cultural history, translation had not operated as a language-learning tool in traditional Indian pedagogy until the late eighteenth century. I focus on two distinct contexts where translation played a new, significant role in the learning of ‘Oriental’ languages: in the British Civil Service and in Protestant mission. Young British men (and later Indian men), aspiring either to a career in colonial administration or responding to a vocational calling in missions to India, were expected to translate accurately between Indian languages to function efficiently in their respective roles.
This has two consequences, I argue, in early modern India. One, by serving to separate those who can translate accurately from those who cannot, translation is perceived for the first time as an effective mechanism by which young men, British and Indian, can prove their expertise in a variety of fields and progress rapidly within powerful colonial institutions. Two, translation as pedagogy introduces new conceptions of what ‘translation’ is and how it can serve to realign power relations between Indian languages. I suggest that the pursuit of commensurability through pedagogical translation exercises across unequal language systems both introduces new measures of competencies in the real world for individual careers and opens up new ways by which Indian languages begin to be perceived in relation to the category ‘modern languages.’