Lost in translation: How idioms trip up Indian speech and politics

Last week, a member of Parliament from West Bengal found herself in hot water because of a slip of the tongue that turned what is a familiar idiom in English into a rather clumsy sentence in Bangla that appeared to advocate a gruesome fate for the Union home minister. She later even doubled down and insisted that people simply did not know idiomatic usage and hence arrived at idiotic conclusions. She was, actually, both right and wrong in her assertion.

That many, if not most, Indians do not know how to speak idiomatically anymore is painfully evident. Spoken languages in India have largely become functional, detached from the literary depth that endowed them with rich prose, of which idioms are a byproduct. Blame school syllabi for this as they provide the content for expression and articulation but advocate a minimalist, utilitarian approach to languages, perhaps in an effort to make them accessible to all.

The upshot of this over-simplification is that there is no reverence for or love of the subtleties that define the individualities of languages. So, given that most Indians learn at least two if not three languages at the school level, their grip on each of them is partial and inadequate, prompting them to hop from one to another in the space of a single thought. As they do not know enough of any one language to make it their mode of expression, this hotch-potch is handy.

Over the years, this lack of proficiency has been passed off as a young generation patois, symbolic of a new kind of syncretism rather than evidence of increasing inarticulation. Some excuse this decline of idiom usage by saying it was inevitable given youngsters’ preference for quick, succinct communication that leaves no time or space for literary devices. Others say globalisation has created a hybrid culture, cut off from the rootedness of idioms.

But arguably, this rising cosmopolitanism and supposed multilingual grounding in India should lead to a more organised sharing of idioms between languages rather than their being jettisoned everywhere. Instead, there is either total absence of idioms in articulation or clumsy adoptions without context. And the result of the latter, at least, is either total incomprehension on the part of the intended audience or a misunderstanding of the burden of the thought.

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Problems occur (as in the case of the MP) when the idioms of one language are sought to be transposed on another unthinkingly, hoping nothing would be lost in translation. It was evident from the umpteen videos of her remark that she tried to turn an English idiom into Bangla in an effort to conduct her entire commentary in the language of her home state, as per the zeitgeist of these times. But the temptation to simply translate idioms can be rather dangerous.In other words, as a niece learnt, much to my amusement, at her French medium school in Pondicherry last year, what’s sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander, especially as a Bengali might think the latter is a pachyderm rather than a fowl. The literal translation of an idiom or its constituent words can lead to an entirely different meaning or none at all, so it is perhaps wiser to steer clear of them altogether even if that means a less colourful repartee.General ignorance of idiomatic usage can be beneficial, of course, if there is an inadvertent slip or a direct translation attempt falls flat. Then it can be confidently asserted that anything implied by such utterances were meant to be rhetorical or metaphorical, not literal; and that those who think otherwise are barking up the wrong tree, idiomatically speaking. Unfortunately for politicians, though, few are ever willing to take them at their word, much less their idiom.
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