Aiming to reach global audience
This is the first time India initiated to render the Hindi speeches of its Prime Minister into English for a wider global audience
India is on a look out for good translators to translate Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindi speech into English.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in search of an ideal translator who could translate his Hindi speech into English.
The objective behind this is to take his thoughts on wide-ranging subjects such as terrorism and climate change to a global audience.
External Publicity and Public Diplomacy Division (XPD) of the external affairs ministry of India has invited agencies, firms and even individuals for technical and financial quotations from interested Delhi based translators.
The total words to be translated are around 90,000 and the last date of submission is May 11.
India’s external affairs ministry has always faced a shortage of interpreters who can ably translate from a foreign language like English into Hindi.
A 2012-13 Parliament report on demand for grants for the ministry had pointed out the non-availability of interpretation facility from Hindi into foreign languages, and vice versa.
In the first stage, a translation test from Hindi to English will be conducted in order to assess quality and authenticity of the translation. And in the second stage, financial evaluation will be carried out of those agencies or firms or individuals whose translations are found satisfactory.
The chosen agency or person will be required to sign a contract with the ministry of external affairs.
Keeping up with the world
This is the first time India initiated to render the Hindi speeches of its Prime Minister into English for a wider global audience.
Like Modi, the 10th Prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, used to address world audience in Hindi as well. As India’s foreign minister during late 1970’s he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in Hindi.
English is the language of global diplomacy and barring Britishers and Americans, most global powers love to hate the medium.
Russian President Vladimir Putin chooses to use Russian during his diplomatic engagements despite his fluency in English, while Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, as all other Chinese leaders, sticks to Mandarin all the time.
Similarly, current Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel rarely speaks English, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff speaks in Portuguese and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe avoid English too.
The importance of English in global diplomacy cannot be undermined. Realising this well, many of them get translators to reach out to global audience.
