UDHAMPUR: The Department of English, Government College for Women Udhampur, today hosted a one week workshop on 'Translation Skills in English.'

At the inaugural session, Dr. Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi, Assistant Professor from School of languages and literature, SMVDU, spoke on the significance of translation. In his presentation, Prof Dwivedi elaborated on the problems of translation. He said translation has always been a challenging task, especially in a country like India which is both multilingual and multicultural.

He also discussed ‘why it has become necessary to always translate our literature from native languages to English'. Prof Dwivedi pointed out that there was hardly any dictionary from Punjabi to Malayalam or Bangla to Gujarati and so on. He said that multilingualism is as important as biodiversity.

Focusing on the importance of Indian oral culture, he lamented on its being almost nonexistent. He emphasised on the necessity of training for the translators. He said that merely having the knowledge of two languages does not make one a good translator.

Prof Tania Akhtar, HOD, Department of English, GCW Udhampur, and the convener of the workshop, in her welcome address highlighted the major points of discussion of the entire workshop.

Prof. Monika Sharma, Principal, GCW Udhampur, encouraged the students to acquire translation skills to use them in life. She requested the resource person to provide suggestions on various papers on Translation Studies that the Department offers to its students.

The session was coordinated by Dr. Meena Gupta and was organised jointly by Dr. Kamal Deep Kaur and Dr. Sumit Sharma, Assistant Professors, Department of English. The programme was well attended and a detailed question and answer session was also held.