ABSTRACT
This chapter formulates seven problems faced by translation across cultures. It first shows that the ‘translation problem’ refers to a collection of different issues, which involve the translation of texts across languages but also embrace philosophical problems such as the incommensurability of theories and inter-theoretic reduction. When cultural differences enter the picture, however, another set of issues arises; that is, translation from European languages into Indian languages confronts problems that remain absent when merely translating between European languages. The chapter argues that Christian theological language has become part of natural language usage in Western culture. When Indians learn to use words such as ‘religion’, ‘worship’, ‘god’, ‘priest’, etc., they map the technical meanings of this vocabulary onto the meanings of some words from their own languages. Another problem arises from the damage inflicted by colonialism on the transmission of Indian culture: while Indians continue to use a series of terms such as citta, manas, buddhi, sat, etc., they have no ‘intuitive’ access to the theories whose terms these are; hence, there is no clarity about the meaning of these words in daily use. It is high time to examine the consequences of such problems of ‘cross-cultural’ translation and the challenges they pose for rethinking the standard accounts of Indian culture and its traditions.
