Bengaluru: Lost in translation! Politicos struggle to get their poll message across

Bengaluru: Come elections and political parties, particularly the Congress and BJP, feel the need for good translators to take the English or Hindi speeches of their leaders from up north to the people down south .

Recently, when Congress president, Rahul Gandhi kicked off the Karnataka leg of his party's election campaign in Haveri, it was KPCC president, Dinesh Gundurao who translated his speech. Sadly, he didn't seem to do it justice as he summed up Mr Gandhi's expansive statements into mere two or three sentences devoid of all the emotion he packed into them.

But others like K.H. Srinivas, a minister in the Devraj Urs cabinet, did a better job, successfully translating the late Prime Ministers, Indira Gandhi and Rajeev Gandhi's election speeches for the south audiences. Former legislative council chairman, D.H. Shankaramurthy and the late Union minister, Ananth Kumar too translated the speeches of late Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee and senior BJP leader, L.K. Advani for Kannadigas.

To his credit, Mr Kumar also translated several speeches of PM Narendra Modi quite successfully.

Interestingly, during the last assembly elections, the BJP came out with the novel idea of deploying many of its young leaders to translate the speeches of scores of national leaders addressing rallies simultaneously at different places. Among the young brigade of translaters were Mohan Limbikai, Vikram Joshi, Ganesh Yaji and Go Madhusudan who translated the speeches of many party veterans. Among them Yaji and Joshi impressed the most, recall BJP leaders.

“Translation of election speeches is not about mastery of English or Hindi, but having a rich vocabulary to convey the emotion of the speaker and the context of the lines spoken,” notes Mr M.H. Shreedhar, a senior BJP functionary.