Books By Vikas DattaAs humanity evolved sufficiently

Translation Travails: Inept or outdated guidebooks that only provoke hilarity (IANS Column: Bookends) #IndiaNEWS #National ,SPOTLIGHT,Art/Culture/Books
By Vikas DattaAs humanity evolved sufficiently to communicate articulately with each other, the foundations of language and all its benefits were laid.
At this time, it is generally believed that there was one common tongue, but as increasing population led to migrations, languages began diverging and proliferating. So did the scope for mutual unintelligibility and misunderstanding.
Of current languages, take Macedonian and Marathi, Spanish and Sinhala, or say, Punjabi and Portuguese. They appear all different and are even spoken on different continents, but they all happen to be members of the Indo-European family that accounts for most languages primary, recognised, or used across all world.
All stem from various historical languages, developing from different proto-languages, said to originate from one common language Proto-Indo-European, in this case.
But due to their succeeding levels of divergence, and other influences and impacts, only linguists and philologists can point out the similarities, and for the common speaker, other Indo-European family languages may seem as mysterious, as those from other families, such as Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Japanese, and so on) or Afro-Asiatic (Arabic), or even fairly contiguous ones like Uralic (Finnish).
So, despite being an essential attribute of humanity and serving the purpose of communication, their multiplicity and variations make languages more liable to creating barriers to understanding, than demolishing them. Though human ingenuity evolved translation to bridge the gap, this didnt entirely solve the problem, given the differences in syntax, idioms, and connotation or even mindsets for that matter.
In the world of technological distractions and limited attention spans that we are in, the interest in learning foreign languages is seeing a decline too. While there are online translation tools and even websites with key phrases for tourists and these are far advanced from the time when the phrase out of sight, out of mind was translated into another language, and on translation back into English, came out as invisible lunatic, these can only help to an extent.
There are good and reliable phrasebooks, say by the likes of Berlitz or Lonely Planet, with pronunciation guides or even transliterations, what happens when the translators are inept, or have not kept pace with times? Let us see some examples, when they make for uproarious humour and incredulous disbelief.
British reporter and author Trevor Fishlock, in his travelogue India File (1987), tells us about coming across a Raj-era Hindustani phrasebook for newly arrived British visitors. In this, he tells us, he found that the Indian equivalent of Hark, our postillion has just been struck by lightning (which he encountered in a book for travellers to Norway) was Look, our ostler has been eaten by a tiger.

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