Introduction

The University of Jammu has recently launched a multi pronged approach to revitalizing the culture, folk and language of the region. In this endeavour The Translation Club would offer an opportunity for the interaction of various regional languages on a single platform. It would focus on bringing writings in regional languages into a multilingual discourse and at the same time provide an impetus to promote regional languages. The objectives of the club would be:

1. To provide a platform of showcasing the linguistic diversity of the region by organizing various translation activities.
2. To prepare a pool of trained translators that can bring these languages into national mainstream discourse by translating them into Hindi and English.
3. To bring out volumes of translation through translation workshops in all the languages of the region in a phased manner.
4. To prepare a corpus of writings that may be used by the researchers in their projects further making them a part of the academic discourse.
5. To digitalise the languages in various forms of writing including folk and their interpretation and translation leading to their preservation and percolation.
6. To use social media to promote the different regional languages through translation.
7. To introduce students to ancient languages, like Sanskrit and Sharda, and to encourage them to appreciate the beauty and value of these languages.
8. To provide students with a basic knowledge of the grammatical structures of different languages, the cultures that spoke them, the literature composed in them, and the manuscripts that preserve them.
9. To give students the opportunity to develop their linguistic and translation skills by working with actual texts in these languages.
10. To promote, preserve and propagate the languages and dialects of Jammu region.
11. However, the club would not restrict its scope to translation in language itself but incorporate the wider connotation of any act of adaptation, appropriation and interpretation as translation, in whatever mode it may be – linguistic, cultural, architectural, folk, sculpture and such other media of expression.

The activities of the club would include:

• Conducting workshops on translation
• Conducting language workshops
• Organising lectures
• Undertaking translation projects
• Creating a dialogue among different languages by bringing different speakers together in various activities
• Creating tie-ups with different National Institutions like NTM, Sahitya Akademi, J&K Cultural Academy, various organizations working in different languages, and others
• Bringing out volumes of translations for wider circulation
• Making glossaries
• Publishing short encyclopedias of cultural facts in various languages