Translation: English to Bengali and Bengali to English
The task and its concepts
Translation in the BCS written paper is judged on accuracy, naturalness, and grammatical correctness in the target language. You need command of sentence structure in both languages, awareness of register, idiom equivalence, and the ability to handle terms that have no direct counterpart.
The key concepts are: literal versus idiomatic translation, structural adjustment (English relies on word order and prepositions; Bengali on case endings and postpositions), voice and tense correspondence, and the treatment of proper nouns, technical terms, and numerals.
Traps that appear in questions
- Word-for-word rendering. Bengali places the verb last and uses postpositions; an English prepositional phrase must often become a possessive or locative case form.
- Idiom mistranslation. "Break the ice" is not about ice; render the sense, not the image.
- Mixing registers. A formal English passage translated into colloquial Bengali loses marks; keep the register consistent.
- False friends and loanwords. Do not assume an English-derived Bengali word carries the English meaning.
- Neglecting gender, number, and honorifics. Bengali verbs and pronouns encode politeness (আপনি, তুমি, সে); choose consistently.
- Untranslated leftovers. Leaving an English word in a Bengali passage without justification is an error.
Worked example
English: "The government has taken several steps to improve public health."
A literal attempt ("সরকার নিয়েছে কয়েক ধাপ উন্নত করতে জনস্বাস্থ্য") is ungrammatical in Bengali word order. A natural rendering places the participle and verb correctly: "জনস্বাস্থ্যের উন্নতির জন্য সরকার কয়েকটি পদক্ষেপ গ্রহণ করেছে।" Note the genitive form উন্নতির, the plural classifier কয়েকটি, and the final verb.
Rule of thumb
Translate meaning, then check structure. Read your target sentence aloud: if a native reader would not say it that way, restructure it, keeping the original's information intact.