Big Fish, Small Fish

What is the next big thing that brand India has to offer to the world after IT? Auto components? State of the art electronic equipment?? Satellite launch vehicles???

If the buzz in the market is anything to go by, ‘translation’ – of all things - is all set to catapult India to the top of the heap in this particular segment of the global market in the near future. The size of the Indian ‘market’ for this supposedly lazy pastime of people with a little flair for languages and plenty of time on hands is, by one estimate, already over $ 500 million. Given the Indians’ penchant for languages, the country has a real possibility of cornering a sizeable chunk of the global market worth over $ 15 billion.

The icing on the cake: it also has the potential to generate more than 5, 00, 000 jobs in the country. Coming as it does from no less a person than Dr. Sam Pitroda, Chairman of the National Knowledge Commission, the figure can hardly be dismissed as idle speculation or ‘castles in the air’.

The one thing that did the trick for the Indian IT industry – ‘cheap labour’ (Yes, you heard right; it was not the much vaunted Indian capacity for patience and facility with the intricate) – is also fuelling the growth in the ‘translation industry’. The best part is: much of the market will be cornered by the vernacular translators (those who translate to and from any Indian language) rather than their ‘elite’ English counterparts, given the increasing tendency among multinational companies to ‘go local’.

This exponential growth in the translation industry will open up vast employment opportunities for Odias – as for their counterparts in other vernacular languages – with some command over their mother tongue and English or any other foreign language. At least some of these Odias can hope to emulate in the none-too-distant future Sandeep Mulkar, Chairman cum Managing Director of the Pune-based (Pune, by all accounts, has emerged as the ‘translation capital’ of India) Bureau for Interpretation and Translation Services, which already has big names like Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, John Deere and SAP, Infosys and Bharat Forge among its clients.

Right? Wrong. I would tell you why.

Shortly after the anti-Christian riots in Kandhamal last year, a well known activist from Mumbai was on a mission collecting FIRs filed by the victims of the riot (no prizes for guessing what purpose the FIRs served). Since the overwhelming majority of them were in Odia, they had to be translated into English to be ‘useful’. So, this woman activist took all the 190 odd FIRs to Mumbai to get them translated.

But a few days later, she called up a senior journalist friend in Bhubaneswar and requested him to get the documents translated by somebody here as the ‘mercenaries’ in Mumbai were quoting an ‘astronomical’ price for the job. The journalist friend obliged and the lady got her job done for one tenth [Or was it one twentieth? Or even one fiftieth?? There is really no way of knowing] of what she would have paid in the Maximum City. Meanwhile, the two young translators in the Minimum City burnt midnight oil for nearly a fortnight to meet the deadline.

It transpired that translation from Odia to English or vice versa costs significantly more than translation to and from most other Indian languages in Mumbai. A little digging up revealed that this is so because there are very few in the city who are competent in both the languages (no surprise this, given the typically Odia trait of ‘forgetting’ their mother tongue at the first available opportunity) and hence the few that there are have to be paid a fat amount by the ad agencies that handle almost the entire business of translation in the city (unless, of course, you happen to know somebody personally).

So, notwithstanding the enormous reach and power of the internet and wonderful innovations like the PDF and scanning, all that the Odia translator can hope to get is a few crumbs left over by the sharks of the trade. Some of the agencies engaged in the translation business in the big cities (that is where the moolah is) may appoint local franchisees and share a minuscule part of their whopping profit with them. But the poor translator, like the poor kendu leaf collector, will continue to earn a pittance unless s/he has the ways and means of setting up shop in the cities where such work is generated. Those who cannot are condemned to ply their trade for as little as Rs. 30, 20 or even Rs. 10 for an A4 size page!!!