By Abdulhadi Hairan

 Some people think that Pashto is a very complicated and hard-to-learn language. The reason behind this perception is a lack of knowledge and inaccessibility to the resources of this ancient yet living and interesting language.

 Similarly, translating from one language into another is a hard job if taken seriously, but in the case of translating into Pashto, it is harder and arduous to translate close to the original meaning. It does not mean that the language is complicated, but unfortunately saying, most of the translators spend their whole life on learning and improving the source language (e.g. English, Arabci, Urdu, Persian, etc.) while ignoring the target language (Pashto). They believe, of course wrongly, that if they are born Pashtuns, and their mother tongue is Pashto (Pashtu) that is enough for their skills to write in (or speak) this language.

 

 As a result, they may be able to write good, even excellent, English, but their Pashto writing is always full of very common mistakes such as typing in non-standard script, word by word translation of expressions and proverbs and writing in an incomprehensible sentence structure. This leads to a complete ruin of the project because the audience will get confused or will just laugh at what the translation presents. Sometimes deadly incidents happen if the misunderstanding occurs during interpretation between two hostiles or in a war-like situation.

 Working in this field for last ten years, I have many first-hand funny accounts of these mistakes. Once when I worked with a local Pashto newspaper, just the use of an incorrect ya (ى) in a news story resulted in the newspaper’s mockery by its readers, writers, and opponents. The story was about the arresting of an Afghan journalist by the administration of Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas. The reporter, who was not a good Pashto writer, faxed the report which just by chance went to a new editor. We have five yas (ى) in Pashto. One of these is ې which is used for females. He used this ya for the arrested journalist, who was a tribal man and wore a whole bunch of beard.

 Looking at the ya, the editor thought the journalist was female. So he used this ya in the whole story and made him a woman. In the morning when the paper was published, the arrested journalist was a woman in the story and a man in his photo, printed side by side with the story (this editor usually did not check the photos; the paper had a separate photo editor who usually did not check the stories).

 This kind of mistakes happen when expressions and proverbs are translated word by word, or ي is used where should be ې, or ۍ instead of ئ, and so on.

For a quality and successful translation, it is necessary that the translator understands and is able to write and translate both the source and target languages with equal good command. They should have full knowledge about both the cultures and traditions to which the source and target language belongs.

 To avoid the mistakes and unwanted results, translators should spend as much time in learning and improving their own language as they do in learning and improving the source language. Experience and scientific studies show that having a good command in their own language will also help them in improving the source languages.