Found in translation – The Hindu

While Parliament is in session, about 100 people cram into soundproof booths overlooking the Parliament chamber. Ranging from young graduates to retired government employees, they have quite the task: to translate the proceedings of both Houses into 23 different languages, covering most of India’s official languages ​​as well as Sanskrit.

Simultaneous interpretation is an art that requires meticulousness; It requires listening to the speaker and translating what they say into another language in real time. The process is so mentally taxing that interpreters change positions every 30 minutes. The word order in most sentences in English is different from most Indian languages; It forces interpreters to deliver sentences quickly, skipping some sentences, and doing all this while listening to the next sentence.

When Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman delivered her Union Budget speech in English in early February, there were two ways to listen: For MPs and those in the public gallery, a pair of headphones and a dial allowed them to adjust the translation in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and 20 other Indian languages; There were live broadcasts on YouTube for those who were not in parliament.

Vineeth (name changed) is working with three colleagues to translate Lok Sabha speeches from English to a south Indian language in real time. Vineeth, a liberal arts college graduate and politics enthusiast, looked at the Lok Sabha’s website just as the Lower House of Parliament in 2023 was advertising vacancies for a role that heralded an overhaul in the way Parliament translates: all languages, at the same time.

The job requires speed, composure and the ability to focus on two activities at once. It is very difficult, especially in terms of sentence structure. For example, the most common usage in English is subject-verb-object, while in Hindi it is subject-object-verb.

Now in 23 languages

The request for simultaneous translation was first raised in the first week of the first session of Parliament on 19 May 1952. A member from Andhra Pradesh asked the then Speaker Ganesh Mavalankar whether translations could be provided for speeches made in a language other than English and Hindi, according to Parliament records.

Mavalankar ridiculed the suggestion. “Let’s not create imaginary difficulties,” he said, adding hastily: “There may be real cases… in those cases the practice will be that the member who wishes to speak will give his own version, and we will have to verify it with a good source who knows the language.” This is a form of sequential translation. But Mavalankar normally hoped that members would speak in a language that everyone in the House would understand. English continued to be the dominant language spoken on the field.

In the five sessions of the Interim Parliament (January 1950 – May 1952), Hindi was spoken for only 146 minutes. By the 1960s, there were more Hindi speakers in both Houses and the lingua franca was slowly changing. In 1963, efforts began to establish simultaneous translation facilities.

In the years thereafter, other languages ​​faced a hurdle: translators were available for Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu and a few other languages, but MPs had to notify the Speaker in writing a day in advance that they planned to speak in their own language. The Secretariat will then be able to ensure that an interpreter is available. Since 2023, it has become increasingly common for MPs to speak in their own language, and real-time translations are available to everyone.

“The MPs are very happy” with elected representatives who can now hear cases in their own language all day long, says Vineeth. “In the first days, they visited us at the stand and encouraged us.” “An MP came up to me and said, ‘You’ve improved a lot!’” Vineeth recalls at a closed parliamentary committee hearing that included interpreters. he said.

During a debate on the Guarantee for ‘Viksit Bharat’ – Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB–G RAM G) Bill, 2025, many MPs from Vineeth State spoke in their own language as rural employment is electorally important.

Many Indians speak at least two languages ​​fairly well. However, simultaneous interpreting is a profession that is rarely used outside of Parliament, where it is among the most prestigious positions in terms of employment. Vineeth recalls taking a “telling” test and interpretation exercise as part of his initial assessment, followed by about five weeks of training on recorded conversations.

Parliament does not make records of comments available upon request. Live broadcasts are taken off the air as soon as the Parliament is adjourned for that day. A perusal of some publications during the Budget Session shows that it is not uncommon for interpreters to stumble, and the Lok Sabha Secretariat, in a disclaimer, says the service is provided for convenience only.

at work

Ram Kesarwani, one of the doyens of India’s simultaneous interpretation industry, says the “pool” of translators working across the country is only in the 100s. Kesarwani’s company, Translation India, has been providing simultaneous translation since 2004. He says demand has always been limited to large events and there is budget to hire them.

Kesarwani says more than half of Parliament’s contract translators (added in the last two years to provide translation into nearly all of India’s official languages) work with his firm or have been trained directly by it.

“Since 2014, business has grown five or six times as usual,” says Kesarwani. “When I started in 2004, I realized that equipment and even foreign language translators were not available in India. Hindi language translators were also not available because only Parliament had translators,” he says. “Therefore, when simultaneous interpretation was needed at any conference, meeting or seminar, requests were made to the Parliament for its employees, and sometimes to different universities for foreign languages.”

Ram Kesarwani is the founder of Translation India. File photo: Special Edit

When Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin held a meeting in Chennai with the CMs of Kerala, Karnataka, Punjab and Telangana, Kesarwani’s freelance translators transcribed the words of each speaker into the languages ​​of the respective Chief Minister, held in a hotel conference hall.

He says that although the simultaneous interpretation industry is experiencing a relative boom, this sector continues to be a challenging field of work because concerts are difficult to access and demand is seasonal. It increases from October to February, when the weather is suitable for large conferences. “This does not make for a secure career,” says Kesarwani.

While there are permanent interpreters in Parliament who are paid with benefits, most interpreters working there today are hired on a contractual basis and receive a salary while the Parliament is in session.

The daily wage for a contract worker in Parliament is around £6,000. For conferences, this amount can range from ₹15,000 to ₹35,000, with most events falling somewhere in between.

The translator pool also includes a better-paid group: international language translators, interpreters for Prime Ministers, and multilateral conferences. At a small gathering of translators in south Delhi earlier this week, some of the most experienced participants in this ecosystem explained why the industry remains small.

A famine and a push

Simultaneous interpretation in Indian languages ​​is a newly developing field. But for international languages, it’s been around a little longer. “The Ministry of External Affairs had a special staff of interpreters,” says retired Spanish professor and simultaneous interpreter Anil Dhingra, who studied at the Indian embassy in Madrid in 1975 and has since had the opportunity to work on many bilateral and multilateral events. “They have now stopped hiring people of this cadre and are instead training Indian External Affairs Ministry officers in a foreign language abroad.” Now, he says, the MEA has a board of approved translators who can be called for foreign languages. In the post-World War II era, as more and more nations gained independence from colonial rule, simultaneous interpretation became a necessity with the establishment of a diplomatic community. The establishment of the United Nations and a multilingual international environment also emerged. The Nuremberg Trials for the prosecution of Nazi war crimes saw a particular need for simultaneous interpretation.

Anil Dhingra. File photo: Special Edit.

Dhingra feels that the Indian government does not pay much attention to translators in India. “For the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in 1983, they brought the entire team of simultaneous conference interpreters from abroad through a British agency.” He admits that at that time, India did not have the number of interpreters needed for such a large event, but efforts should have been made to have Indian interpreters apprenticed under experienced professionals. He says that there is currently no course that provides simultaneous translation training in Indian languages.

Despite these restrictions, the translation pool is growing “gradually”, says French-English translator Prachi Chawla. “There is a new demand for Hindi-Gujarati and other Indian language pairs,” he said, citing LinkedIn job postings circulating among translators.

AI input

There was one more way for people to listen to Sitharaman’s Budget speech by tuning into the regional language feeds of a free news channel on YouTube; here, Bengaluru start-up Sarvam AI was dubbing the speech into Hindi and other languages ​​in Sitharaman’s own voice. The company was using the latest translation model for Indian languages. This was the first AI-powered interpretation of Parliament proceedings.

The broadcast was delayed by two minutes, giving the startup team enough time to punctuate Sitharaman’s sentences and produce translations that would take no longer than the translation model’s original descriptions.

Machine translation is getting better in Indian languages, thanks to government efforts like the National Language Translation Mission (BHASHINI) and private efforts from companies like Sarvam.

Kesarwani claims that some of the records of Parliament’s consultant translators were used to develop BHASHINI. After all, translation models get better the more data they have. The lack of online texts in Indian languages ​​is a major reason why the quality of translation in Indian languages ​​lags behind established languages ​​with online users, such as European or East Asian languages.

The AI ​​wave has led to companies like Sarvam gaining unprecedented support in developing large language models (LLMs) and translation models that outperform their predecessors. Kesarwani says machine translations for Indian languages ​​are improving rapidly. “I think in the next year or two everything will be completely clear.” It has also begun offering AI-powered services as part of its offerings. At a party of simultaneous interpreters, a fellow guest scolds him for doing this.

There is music at the party, and many professionals say that other types of skills that require coordinated movement, such as playing the piano, overlap with the interpreter’s skill in the job.

Kesarwani has been doing this for 35 years and says those who build their careers in translating do so in international languages. “They’re getting closer to retirement, and new graduates aren’t much of a translator.”

For now, Parliament will need real-life interpreters, as it does for major events, but AI is confident to find a place in the translation industry.

Contributed by Sobhana K. Nair

aroon.deep@thehindu.co.in

Edited by Sunalini Mathew.