Unlike Japan and China, which translate every single research paper and specialized monograph in science, technology and medicine into English within months of their publication, our academies and research institutes do nothing of the kind. That is why it is only possible to pick up a fragmentary knowledge of any subject in the regional languages. Even students studying different subjects in Bengali, the richest among vernacular languages, have to supplement their meagre literature with English language books to gain some proficiency in the subject. Translators — Pushkin described them as “post-horses of culture” — are required to leap-frog our regional literatures to somewhere in the 20th century. Hence the question: if Japan and China, that do not have the same knowledge of English as we do, can do it, why can’t we?

It isn’t a question of money. There is enough money going around to pay translators what they ask for, provided they are competent to do their jobs. Macmillan India paid as much as Rs 35 per page for translations from English into Hindi in the Seventies, which was much more than the going-rate of the academies, and was prepared to negotiate higher rates plus a royalty. But it did not work. The Hindi section was closed down and the stock pulped after an investment of Rs 15 crores over a 12-year period.

Three reasons were put forward for this. First, that the wrong titles, which did not have large sales potential, were translated. Second, the editorial quality was poor. Third, the terms of trade were not attractive enough, and publicity and marketing poor. All three reasons had some truth, but there was obviously a deeper malaise which can be described somewhat like this.

Most academics consider translations to be infra dig, derivative hack-work. What this means in practical terms is that publishers have to fall back upon the second string and compromise on the editorial quality of the work. Indian academics are not as proficient in the written language as we expect them to be. They may be in one language, but not in two or more languages. But translation is not transliteration, which is substituting one word for a corresponding word in another language. What the translator must know is the cultural meanings or metaphors of both languages. Without this proficiency, translation becomes stilted and lifeless.

Saying all this doesn’t quite help get translations under way. Perhaps, one way out of this situation would be to realize that we are not looking for a perfect ‘copy’ or a piece of beautiful prose; what we want is a functionally useful translation. Even an imperfect translation is better than no translation at all.

Ravi Vyas