6.7 Kanakmani Dixit – "Desperation for Translation"

Author/context: Kanak Mani Dixit — Kathmandu-based journalist, editor and publisher (founding editor of Himal Southasian), known for essays on Nepal's politics, media and language. This essay reflects on Nepali as the country's bridge language and the price Nepal pays for not translating — and being translated.Synopsis (analysis of the essay's argument): Nepali, Dixit notes, now runs the courts, the media and education: judgments and orders — dense with Sanskrit and Farsi legal vocabulary — speak directly to citizens without interpreters, and the media in the vernacular have connected the public to public affairs. But the same ascendancy has made society insular: the Nepali published corpus is small (he estimates no more than about 50,000 books, mostly fiction, religious writing and travelogues, with little rigorous non-fiction), the intelligentsia is weakened, readers have drifted from Indian and international media, and the world does not know Nepal — because Nepal's judgments and experiences are not translated out, nor world knowledgeadequately translated in. Nepal's judges cite British and Indian precedents; the reverse never happens, since foreign practitioners cannot read Nepali law. A more confident polity, he argues, would translate its significant judgments into English immediately, for the world to applaud or critique — while Nepal simultaneously translated the world into Nepali. Translation is not decoration; it is survival for a small polity in a…