Star Of Mysore has an editorial today on court judgments being written in Kannada. The editorial questions P. D. Dinakaran’s (the new Chief Justice of Karnataka High Court) call to lower court judges to write judgments in Kannada. Let me quote two paragraphs in particular.
It has been made out that if judgements are written in Kannada, the petitioners will clearly understand the ruling. That is a bit hard to concede because Kannada in use in the State has distinct variations. Influence of Malayalam and Tulu in Dakshina Kannada district, that of Marathi in Uttara Kannada district, Urdu in Hyderabad-Karnataka region, and lastly, Telugu and Tamil in districts bordering Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu can yield court rulings not 100 per cent intelligible to petitioners.
Higher courts in which judgements of lower courts are questioned will have to wrestle with the aforementioned variants of Kannada even if translated into English for the benefit of Higher Court Judges who do not know Kannada.
Now this line of argument is nonsense. Variations in Kannada aren’t so radical as to prevent a Kannadiga from Bellari understand the judgment given in Kodagu. Kannada has been used for writing for over 1600 years and it has functioned quite well if only because written language is always by and large shared by all Kannada speakers. And then to suggest that English is without variants and perfectly transparent to everybody is idiotic.
Finally, why is this question of translation such a big issue? At any given point of time, there are less than thirty non-Kannada speaking High Court judges. Give each one a personal translator and the problem is solved.
One Comment
**************************
Post a Comment