'Having Done Food': Literal Translation and the Idiom Mark
A +2 Sanskrit Sahitya paper includes a five-mark translation passage from Sanskrit into English or Malayalam. The passage contains 'भोजनं कृत्वा विद्यालयं गतः बालः', 'तस्य माता तं दृष्ट्वा प्रसन्ना अभवत्', and the idiom 'काकतालीयवत्'. The scheme allots two marks for sense, two for grammar and tense, and one for the idiom. Script P translates literally: 'Having done food, the boy went to school; his mother, having seen him, became pleased.' Script Q writes: 'After eating, the boy went to school; his mother was pleased to see him.' Script R writes: 'The boy went to school after eating; his mother, seeing him, became happy, as if a crow and a palm fruit.' Script S omits the idiom entirely but gets the rest perfect. The teacher must decide whether to reward Q's natural English or penalise it for dropping 'having done'.
1. How should P, Q, R, and S be marked under the scheme?
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P: about 3/5. Sense is largely recoverable, but 'having done food' is not idiomatic and misrenders the action; grammar is acceptable, but the idiom is absent. Q: 4/5 or 5/5 depending on whether the idiom appears elsewhere; as described, Q loses the idiom mark but earns full sense and grammar. 'After eating' is a correct functional rendering of 'bhoganam krtva'; a participle is not obligatory. R: 2–3/5. R attempts the idiom but renders it literally as 'as if a crow and a palm fruit', which does not convey 'by coincidence'; sense and grammar are partly there. S: 4/5 if the rest is perfect, minus the idiom mark. The scheme rewards sense and grammar, not word-for-word correspondence.
2. What principle governs the idiom mark when the target language has no exact equivalent?
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Award the idiom mark for functional equivalence. 'Kakataleeyavat' means 'as a chance coincidence', not a literal crow and palm fruit. A translation that says 'coincidentally' or 'as it happened' earns the mark; a literal rendering that leaves the target reader puzzled does not. If the target language has a ready idiom for coincidence, use it; if not, a plain adverb is better than a literal image. The examiner should not require a cultural note in a five-mark translation.
3. If a student's translation is stylistically better but changes the tense of one verb, how do you apply the 2+2+1 split without double-penalising?
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Apply the split by primary error. Sense checks propositional content and sequence; grammar checks tense, agreement, and construction. If a student writes 'the boy has gone' for 'gatah', the completion is changed: deduct one from sense for the altered sequence and one from grammar for tense, but do not zero both. If the change is purely stylistic and the sequence is intact, deduct only from grammar. The principle is to avoid double-penalising one error while still signalling that tense is part of the grammar mark.