Personal Notes of a Translator

I have been a translator for such a long time. I received the Katha Translation Award for translating a Gujarati short story into English way back in 1996 and then for a number of years, I have had quite a bit of professional translation experience. Then in 2005, I was interviewed by Dr. Tim Altanero, who was an Associate Professor at Austin Community College, for an article that he wrote on translating airline menus for Multilingual Computing and Technology, which is a well-known magazine that caters to the translation and the localization industry. You can read that article online at this link. And I taught a Certificate in Translation Proficiency for three years in my University. I have also taught Diploma in Translation Proficiency for the last two years.

I was a Moderator of ProZ.com for English-Gujarati, Gujarati-English language communities and also for the Literature Forum from December 2000 to December 2007, when I quit due to personal reasons. Presently, I am one of the co-moderators of the American Translators' Association's Language Technology Division's mailing list.

All this sounds good to those who can understand what it means.

But years ago, things were a bit different. The person who I would like to acknowledge as my guru, the person who really motivated me to begin translating in my life was a gentleman called Professor K Satchidanandan. He is a well known Malayalam writer and he used to be the editor of Indian Literature, a journal published by the Indian Academy of Letters, which is called the Sahitya Akademi here.

I wanted to write this post here to publicly acknowledge my debt to him and I shall remain indebted to him forever. Thanks a lot, Professor K Satchidanandan.