The Publishing Horizon

Translating The Economist into Indian langauges? Why not!

Andy Baio discovered The Eco Team.

... a group of dedicated fans of The Economist newsmagazine are translating each weekly issue cover-to-cover, splitting up the work among a team of volunteers, and redistributing the finished translations as complete PDFs for a Chinese audience.

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It's an impressive example of online collaboration with simple tools, a completely non-commercial effort by volunteers interested in spreading knowledge while improving their English skills. In the process, they're taking a political risk in translating controversial articles about their homeland behind the Great Firewall.

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They call themselves The Eco Team, a group of about 240 passionate Economist fans led by a 39-year-old insurance broker named Shi Yi. The ECO China forum was originally founded in May 2006 by a mysterious character named "nEo," though he's no longer involved with the site. On their About Us page, nEo delivers the mission statement:

"Like the forum name says, producing a Chinese version of The Economist is our goal. But we're still young and immature; very amateur, not professional. So what? Because we are young, we have the fervor, the enthusiasm, the passion. Because we are amateurs, we'll double our efforts to do our best. As long as we wish, we can be successful and do a good job!"

Every week, in their Weekly Topics forum (translation), a moderator creates a thread linking to every untranslated article from the newest issue on Economist.com. Here's the list for this week's issue, published on February 21.

Volunteers choose their stories in the comments, while the moderator keeps track of assignments. As each story's translated, it's posted as a new thread in topic-specific forums, like Special Reports or Science & Technology.

Each article weaves together paragraphs of the original text and its translation, while other volunteers suggest their corrections in the comments. The lead editor incorporates all the comments, eventually arriving at a final draft ready for publication.

The best part is that The Economist is actually ok with the Eco Team doing their thing - an extremely smart move on the part of The Economist.

How long before we can get Indian language translations of magazines like The Economist? Time we did something about it.

As an aside, The Economist is part of my staple media diet. Though I don't necessarily agree with all the views expressed in The Economist, I'm an unabashed admirer - it is a simply superb magazine.

English translations of Tamil pulp fiction

Mukul Kesavan gains access to the world of Tamil pulp fiction through recently published English translations (published by Blaft, a Chennai-based publishing house) and is overwhelmed.

But like many Anglophone Indians, I find reading in an Indian language a chore. The reason our reading lives aren’t nourished by popular novels set in locales we know is not because they aren’t written, but because they aren’t translated.

Which brings me to this anthology, a riveting collection of stories written by 10 bestselling Tamil writers. They are real professionals who make Stephen King and Barbara Cartland look like amateurs. Indra Soundar Rajan, who is represented here by a splendid story on the theme of reincarnation, has written 500 short novels. If that sounds like fiction manufactured on an industrial scale, wait till you get to Rajesh Kumar, who has published 1,250 novels and 2,000 short stories in 40 years.

To the discriminating Anglophone desi, who buys Rushdie for literary sustenance and Dick Francis for base narrative pleasure, this suggests that everything they write is awful. Not so fast. He might consider the fact that during the boom years of Tamil pulp fiction, the mid-’90s, Rajesh Kumar’s novels sold in millions. Then he might actually read the stories and novellas in this anthology. My personal favourites are two private-eye tales: Hurricane Vaij by Subha (pen name for two writers, Suresh and Balakrishnan) and Sweetheart, Please Die! by Pattukkottai Prabhakar, but a reader looking for romance should read Dim Lights, Blazing Hearts by Ramanichandran, while someone in the market for lurid, "real-life" squalor might sample My Name is Kamala, a massively popular novel about prostitutes in Delhi.

I don’t know Tamil so I can’t tell what’s been lost in translation, but the magical thing about this anthology is that I never once thought of the stories as Tamil stories. In Pritham Chakravarthy’s translations, the characters in these stories live and breathe an English that smells like a neutral ether: neither elaborately English nor annoyingly vernacular.And it’s hard to convey the delight I felt in reading time-pass fiction where the starlets, the hard-boiled detectives and the vengeful goddesses came from the world I inhabited, were mine.

There are two reasons to buy this book. One, it’s a wonderful read and, two, it’s the best-produced paperback in the history of Indian publishing. From the luridly brilliant cover (complete with gun-toting, full-breasted Tamil rose) to the colour plates, the line drawings, the perfectly judged author introductions and the high-quality paper inside, this book is an object lesson in how publishing is done.

The Hindu describes the origins of the idea for a publishing initiative like Blaft.

“I got interested in Tamil pulp fiction novels after moving to Chennai in 1998,” says Rakesh Kumar Khanna, a mathematician from U.C. Berkeley and IIT Madras.

“But I found that none of these books were being translated, and I really wanted to read them!”

So, he began a personal project to translate the treasure trove of pulp literature in Tamil. That morphed into Blaft when his wife Rashmi Ruth Devadasan and their friend Kaveri Lalchand came on board.