Janet Mascarenhas
Translation in Goa is more than the movement of words from one language to another. It is also about carrying cultural expressions and nuances across languages, scripts and communities. As different voices working with languages point out, the process comes with its own challenges and opportunities. Goa, with its diverse historical background, is a multilingual state where people speak Konkani, English, Marathi, Portuguese and Hindi. Konkani is the state language and is spoken in various dialects and written in different scripts. This makes translation an even more complicated process when addressing certain words that have different meanings across languages and dialects. Having a clear command over language is necessary to carry forward a successful translation. Dr Tanvi Bambolkar, an assistant professor in English and Sahitya Akademi Award-winning Konkani author, highlights, “Translation is not just a tool of transferring one language to another but also seeing that a part of someone’s culture is either brought into one language or taken from one language to another.
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It is very important to note that when some work from another language is translated to Konkani, there has to be consideration for all the dialects of Konkani.” The beautiful thing she says about Konkani literature and language is that it has tried to adopt and amalgamate words from different dialects based on the highest usage of the words. She adds, “Shenoi Goembab (a pioneering Goan writer regarded as the father of modern Konkani literature) used words from different dialects of Konkani that helped bring about inclusivity and representation in the language. The difficulty lies in the translation of proper nouns like ‘Zagor’, ‘Shigmo’, ‘Fugddi’ that are very culture- and region-specific.” Information is no longer limited to a place or community as technology has helped in bridging gaps with translations.
Ramdas Karmali, an assistant professor of Computer Science and Technology, has largely contributed to developing critical local language digital infrastructure, including a Phonetic Dictionary for Konkani. Technology is becoming available to many well-resourced languages that have sufficient text and speech data. However, Konkani, he says, is a low resource language and has to still rely largely on human translators, especially because of its diversity. Damodar Ghanekar, a lexicographer, translator and encyclopedist, highlights that, in order to actually capture each and every nuance of each word across dialects, it needs in-depth fieldwork. Expressing urgency, he says, “The older generation is dying and they have the vocabulary. Most of the elderly people are not well educated. In another 10 to 15 years, we will lose this generation.” Dr Celsa Pinto, an archival historian, author and translator, shares that in Goan archival records from the 16th to 19th centuries, Konkani is largely absent except exists in certain terminology referring to certain titles and customs. Most of the records are in Portuguese that is very different to the Portuguese spoken today and a lot of information is lost to time as there are very few who can transcribe this version to be then translated to a widely understandable language.
TECHNOLOGY AND LANGUAGE
As Konkani continues to find its place in the digital world, technology is becoming an important part of its journey. From developing language tools to exploring ways of making translation easier, technology is opening up new possibilities for the language. AI has to be used cautiously across sectors, states Tanvi, considering the environmental and ethical concerns. She observes that AI in Konkani hasn’t yet advanced to a level where people are generating creative writing with it. “However, with so many attempts of feeding AI with Konkani content, the day is not far when it will help creative writers as well.” Vincy Quadros, a Sahitya Akademi Awardee, translator and writer, shares “Though AI gives many translations in Romi Konkani, they do not have enough data and their spellings do not match with ours. This changes the meaning, as one word has multiple meanings.” The script is still developing, and how much has been fed to AI is still a question to him. Another major concern he says is that Konkani in the Roman script is not officially recognised, so Google Translate currently doesn’t support it. Ramdas believes that technology has to be developed to preserve Konkani and to also keep pace with the other languages. “The most challenging part is you require corpuses like speech and text corpus to train AI devices that require a lot of data to be trained, as resources are not available. We have been working for the past 10 to 15 years to create such resources and decent results despite having low resources. Translation, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, handwritten recognition and so on are required in a digital world.”
AI AND ITS FUTURE IN GOAN TRANSLATIONS
Artificial intelligence is taking the conversation a step further. With AI increasingly being used for translation, the question now is what it can offer a developing language like Konkani and how far technology can go in understanding the language beyond words. Dr Celsa says, “Technology can help the newcomers. All they have to do is ask for digitised copies and after that use technology to understand things. AI reduces the creativity of a person, but AI also would help those who have these inhibitions to come to the archives.” Aren Noronha, a young Portuguese postgraduate, who has recently stepped into the field of Portuguese-to-English translation, besides editing, expresses that “even with AI assistance, translation remains a task that requires hard work to ensure the end result is faithful, culturally relevant to the target audience (more so since English is a language culturally split across the globe in wide varieties), and above all, serves as a bridge between both cultures. This requires much disciplined hard work. It is not something that can be entirely or even largely outsourced to a machine.” He too believes that “AI is a useful tool for translations but ultimately still just a tool that needs heavy human intervention and oversight at every point. It may speed up workflows by doing some of the heavy lifting, but the problem of translations in Goa lies elsewhere.” Ramdas shares that the Bhashini initiative in Goa, which is a collaborative effort between the Digital India Bhashini Division (DIBD) and the Government of Goa, of which he is a part of, is tailoring its technology specifically for Konkani. He says, “A sufficiently well trained AI model can give good translation yet they are not perfect. However, it can aid translators by reducing the effort they have to put initially and they can later fine tune it and make it better. There is a lot of work that needs to be done and there are not enough translators available to do it manually, especially in domain specific fields like in the judiciary it becomes very difficult while preserving the meaning of the text.” Aren says, “Computer-aided translation (CAT) tools and AI machine translation can certainly speed up the process of translation as compared to manual translations. This, in turn, allows producing more translated works at a faster rate.
Whether this helps more translations to happen, or improve the quality of the translation, or find newer markets is left to be seen. The translation market in Goa is still one with many challenges despite the advance of technology. Goa is losing its ability to learn foreign languages, this is especially the situation with languages like Portuguese. Despite Goa being the region that produced the largest amount of Portuguese-language literature in Asia, with much of our Goan writings, heritage and past stories contained in it, much of it remains untranslated. Some of these works are translated by translators in the US and UK rather than in Goa itself; they understand its worth better than we do. The burning question remains of why Goa fails to translate its own cultural works, as they’re lost in (a lack of) translation.” While algorithms help scale up local language output, these prominent voices from Goa highlight that human editing remains irreplaceable, and AI is a resourceful tool that can help speed the process.
