Translation: word-for-word, idiom and honorifics
Your Translation section has four items worth two marks each: two English sentences to render into Hindi and two Hindi sentences to render into English. Your draft answers are these. (a) English: 'He was given a book by his teacher.' Draft: 'उसे उसके शिक्षक द्वारा एक पुस्तक दी गई।' (b) English: 'Do not add fuel to the fire.' Draft: 'आग में ईंधन मत डालो।' (c) Hindi: 'मेरे पिता जी ने कहा कि वे कल पटना जाएँगे।' Draft: 'My father said that he will go to Patna tomorrow.' (d) Hindi: 'कृपया अपना परिचय दीजिए।' Draft: 'Please give your introduction.' A classmate tells you that (a) and (d) should be marked wrong because a good translation never follows the source word for word, and that (b) is perfectly fine because any Hindi speaker will understand it. You have to decide what to defend.
1. Mark each draft out of 2 and name the issue at stake in each: idiom, tense and time words, honorifics, or sentence structure.
Read the worked answer
- (a) 2 out of 2 - sentence structure. The passive is preserved with द्वारा, the tense is right, and the agent is in the correct case. The active version 'उसके शिक्षक ने उसे एक पुस्तक दी' is equally good; nothing is lost either way.
- (b) 1 out of 2 - idiom. The words are translated but the idiom is not. 'ईंधन' is a dictionary equivalent, not the fixed Hindi expression. A marker can see what you meant, so give 1 for communication, but the idiom mark is gone.
- (c) 0 out of 2 - tense and time words. Two errors: 'will go' should backshift to 'would go', and 'tomorrow' should become 'the next day'. The honorifics are actually handled correctly - 'पिता जी' becomes plain 'my father' and 'वे' becomes 'he', because English has no जी and does not use a plural for a single respected person.
- (d) 1 out of 2 - honorifics and idiom. 'कृपया' as 'please' is right, but 'give your introduction' is not idiomatic English; the natural rendering is 'Please introduce yourself.'
Pattern: (a) scores because the two languages share the structure; (b) fails because they do not.
2. Rewrite (b), (c) and (d), justifying each change in one line.
Read the worked answer
- (b) 'आग में घी मत डालो।' Hindi expresses 'to make things worse' with ghee, not fuel; an idiom must be replaced by the target language's idiom, not translated word by word. 'मामला और मत बिगाड़ो' is an acceptable plain-language alternative.
- (c) 'My father said that he would go to Patna the next day.' The reporting verb is past, so 'will' becomes 'would' and 'कल' in a past report becomes 'the next day'. Time words in reported speech are part of the tense system, not decoration.
- (d) 'Please introduce yourself.' English performs this function with a reflexive verb; 'give your introduction' is a word-for-word transplant that sounds foreign even though it is understandable.
In each case the fix is the same operation: find the function the sentence performs - warning, reporting, requesting - and use the target language's normal way of performing it.
3. Answer your classmate's claim that a good translation must never follow the source word for word, using (a) as your example.
Read the worked answer
The claim is too strong, and (a) proves it. 'उसे उसके शिक्षक द्वारा एक पुस्तक दी गई' follows the English structure closely - same passive, same agent, same order - and it is perfectly good Hindi, because Hindi happens to possess the equivalent passive construction with द्वारा.
The correct rule is conditional, not absolute: keep the source structure where the target language has an equivalent structure; rebuild where it does not. Hindi shares the passive with English, so (a) can be carried across. Hindi does not share the idiom in (b), so it must be rebuilt. Hindi marks respect with जी and with plural verb forms, English does not, so (c) must be levelled down rather than translated literally. English forms requests with reflexive verbs, so (d) must be rebuilt.
So mark on equivalence of meaning, register and function - not on whether the word order matches. A close translation that sounds natural scores full marks; a loose one that changes the meaning scores nothing.