Translation: Persian into Odia and English
Translation is marked on accuracy of meaning, not elegance. The examiner checks tense, number, negation, definiteness and idiom - the four or five places where a word-for-word rendering breaks down.
A five-step routine
- Bracket the sentence and mark the finite verb at the end.
- Identify the subject and force agreement.
- Note polarity (na-, ma-, bi-) and aspect (mi-, perfect participle).
- Unpack ezāfe chains into possessive/'of' constructions.
- Re-order into the target language, then check idioms separately.
Persian into English
English needs SVO, articles and tense auxiliaries that Persian leaves implicit. rā usually disappears; ezāfe becomes of or a possessive. Copulas: ast = is, bud = was, nist = is not.
Persian into Odia
Odia is also verb-final, so order transfers more easily; the work is in case endings, honorifics and verb tense forms. Do not carry Persian rā across as a postposition; use the Odia object case.
Worked example
Man az in ketāb khosham āmad. Word-for-word: 'To-me from this book liking came.' Reasoning: az … khosham āmad is an idiom of pleasure, not motion. English: 'I liked this book.' Odia: express it as 'this book pleased me' with the experiencer in the oblique.
Traps
Word-for-word rendering; dropping a negative prefix; losing plural number; translating an idiom literally; translating ast as 'is' inside a past-tense sentence; forgetting that Persian has no indefinite article to carry over.