Mistranslation Of Words May Cause Hiroshima-Like Tragedy

Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): I have striven throughout my translation to recreate the text as an English Dhw. of the Hindi, seeking out wordplays, echoes, etymologies and coinages that feel Hindi-esque – Daisy Rockwell, translator of Geetanjali Shree’s booker-winning Hindi Novel, Ret Samadhi (Ret Samadhi) Translators have a greater responsibility than the writers of original books, because a slip of the pen may lead to destruction of cities, misunderstanding of great authors and embarrassing situations for states. It is supposed that a translation error of a Japanese term allegedly prompted the US to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Likewise, the mistranslation of the work of an Italian astronomer made many people believe that there is life on Mars. A declassified document of World War II has discussed how an ill-chosen translation of the Japanese word Mokusatsu provoked the United States to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. What does Mokusatsu mean?

The Japanese-English dictionary says it is a noun which means to take no notice of, or treat with silent contempt, ignore by keeping silent or remain in a wise and masterly inactivity. The English language may soon adopt this word as it has already done by including some Indian words like Guru, Jai Ho, Dekko, Sherbet, Raaj, Raja, Nawab and Kebab.

One cannot forget the much-used expression – to run amok – which has been culled from a tradition in Malay Asia. Hobson Jobson, a dictionary that deals with the foreign words included in the English language, says, “When someone wants to commit suicide, they run towards speeding vehicles. This practice is called amok in that country.”

Although many linguists know how the mistranslation of Mokusatsu led to the destruction of Hiroshima, yet it will be wrong to clam up about the story to readers. It was 1945. World War II was slowly wearing out as it was left with nothing more to consume. The warring nations were also worn out. The Allied leaders meeting in Potsdam submitted a stiffly-worded declaration of surrender terms for Japan.

They were anxiously abiding for a response. The terms included in the declaration were that any negative response would invite “prompt and utter destruction.” Freddy Truman, W Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Chiang Kai-Shek issued a statement expecting that Japan should surrender unconditionally and prevent devastation of the Japanese homeland. Reporters wanted to know from Japanese Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki’s reaction to the declaration.

Like any other politician, Kantaro said he was withholding comments using the Japanese word – Mokusatsu – which means silence. The journalists across the world, however, construed it as “not worthy of comment.” Suzuki’s tone angered the US officials who thought it was another example of Banzai and Kamikaze spirit, and, within ten days of this incident, the US decided to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

The rest is history.   An Italian astronomer Giovanni Schlaparelli called Martian channels as ‘canali’ which was understood as ‘canals’ that made people across the world believe that there is water on Mars. However tragic or comic these incidents may have been, there are many instances where one can gain through translation. Without the translation of Petrarch, you would have never known the rich history of the sonnet form in English. You would have never got hundreds of expressions that stem from the King James’s version of the Bible.

You would have never read or known about Albert Kamus’s great work L’ Etranger (The Outsider), unless it was translated into English. We would have been deprived of reading thousands of classics written in different languages across the world, like Les Trois Mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers), La Tulipe Noire (The Black Tulip) and Hier et Demain (Today and Tomorrow). Translation is an art.

It requires a lot of hard work and good command of two languages to complete this task honestly. To render a poem from one language into another, one has to do a lot of research about the poets, the times they are living in and the times they are working in. Each country has many cultural idioms, grammar and syntactic structures.

For example, in most of the Indian languages, a sentence consists of subject, object and verb.  In Hindi, we say – Main Ghar Jata Hun, and, in Bengali, it is Aami Badi Jachhi. The sentence structure is similar – subject “I” or “Main” is being followed by the object “Ghar” or “Badi” me.ng home. The verb is used at the end of the sentence.

On the contrary, a sentence in the English language is composed of subject, verb and object – I go home. AI translation is often very funny, because it also translates the proper nouns. Novelist Geetanjali Shree’s Ret Samadhi (Tomb of Sand), translated from Hindi into English, by Daisy Rockwell won the Booker Prize 2022. Literary critics across the world hailed the translation.