Fahm / Tarjuma: Comprehension of unseen text and faithful translation
What is tested
Fahm gives an unseen passage, sometimes prose and sometimes a stanza, and asks for jawabat, markazi khayal and word meanings. Tarjuma asks for a faithful rendering into English or Malayalam as the paper directs. Both reward close reading far more than vocabulary display.
Rules that earn marks
- Read the passage twice: once for gist, once for the exact words the questions quote.
- Answer in your own words. Copying a whole sentence rarely earns full marks, and copying beyond the asked point loses marks.
- For word meanings, give the sense the word carries in that sentence, not its whole dictionary range.
- Translate sentence by sentence, preserving tense, number and voice. Proper nouns stay unchanged.
- Translate idioms by equivalent, never literally: 'aankh ka tara' = the apple of one's eye; 'paani pher dena' = to back out of a promise.
- Keep the original order of ideas; add no explanation the passage does not contain.
Worked example
Urdu: 'Waqt par kaam karne wala kabhi pas-e-pa nahin rehta.'
Reasoning: identify the subject (kaam karne wala), the time clause (waqt par), and the idiom 'pas-e-pa rehna', which means to lag behind. A literal rendering, 'remains at the foot', is wrong. Result: 'One who works on time never lags behind.' If the same sentence is asked in Malayalam, the three elements stay identical; only the idiom's equivalent changes.
Traps
Word-for-word translation that breaks the target language's word order; leaving an idiom literal; answering a two-sentence question in one word; guessing a word's meaning from its sound rather than its context; ignoring the mark value when deciding length.