A Definitive Approach to Online English to Tamil Translation
What is a translation? Often, though not by any means always, it is rendering the meaning of a text into another language in the way that the author intended the text. Common sense tells us that this ought to be simple, as one ought to be able to say something as well in one language as in another. Danila Seleskovitch, a brilliant interpreter and writer, has said: ‘Everything said in one language can be expressed in another — on condition that the two languages belong to cultures that have reached a comparable degree of development/ The condition she makes is false and misleading. The translation is an instrument of education as well as of truth precisely because it has to reach readers whose cultural and educational level is different from, and often ‘lower’ or earlier, than, that of the readers of the original. An online English to Tamil dictionary must be able to process the complexities of both languages.
Translation has its own excitement, its own interest. A satisfactory translation is always possible, but a good translator is never satisfied with it. It can usually be improved. There is no such thing as a perfect, ideal or ‘correct’ translation, A translator is always trying to extend his knowledge and improve his means of expression; he is always pursuing facts and words. He works on four levels: translation is first a science, which entails the knowledge and verification of the facts and the language that describes them- here, what is wrong, mistakes of truth, can be identified; secondly, it is a skill, which calls for appropriate language and acceptable usage; thirdly, an art, which distinguishes good from undistinguished writing and is the creative, the intuitive, sometimes the inspired, level of the translation; lastly, a matter of taste, where argument ceases, preferences are expressed, and the variety of meritorious translations is the reflection of individual differences.
As a means of communication, translation is used for multilingual notices, which have at last appeared increasingly conspicuously in public places; for instructions issued by exporting companies; for tourist publicity, where it is too often produced from the native into the ‘foreign’ language by natives as a matter of national pride; for official documents, such as treaties and contracts; for reports, papers, articles, correspondence? textbooks to convey information, advice, and recommendations for every branch of knowledge. Its volume has increased with the rise of the mass media, the increase in the number of independent countries, and the growing recognition of the importance of linguistic minorities in all the countries of the world.
Translation has been instrumental in transmitting culture, sometimes under unequal conditions responsible for distorted and biased translations, ever since countries and languages have been in contact with each other. That translation is not merely a transmitter of culture, but also of the truth, a force for progress could be instanced by following the course of resistance to Bible translation and the preservation of Latin as a superior language of the elect, with a consequent disincentive to translating between other languages. Therefore, English to Tamil translation online has an additional responsibility of understanding the culture of both languages.
