Insightful Interview with Rohit Sharma, Founder of Awaaz Initiative

Tell us about yourself. What motivated you to join the project of translating landmark judgments of the Supreme Court of India into local/regional languages?

My name is Rohit Sharma, and I am the Founder of Awaaz Initiative, which led this E-book project in regional languages along with Justice Adda and Manupatra. I also led the Hindi Team with Daisy and Virendra, which was a remarkable experience. One of the reason we started this project is because I remember how as a first year law student coming from Gwalior, I initially found it difficult to understand some case laws because of its difficult language. I thought that despite being in a more developed law school, I had to struggle with language, and there would be so many people like me who’d like to understand prominent judgments that really shaped Indian jurisprudence.

This compendium, which was initially published in easy English could be understood by laypersons. However, I also felt that in order to sensitize more people to prominent judgments, which have indeed changed the Indian discourse right from human rights, prisoners rights, gender and sexuality rights to climate-related issues, we need to go beyond English.

If we imagine India as a constitutional democracy, I feel citizens deserve the right to know how the judgments which are shaping the Indian polity affect them directly and indirectly. We began with five languages, i.e. Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Marathi and Malayalam, due to logistical constraints, but the experience was full of learnings on making legal information accessible in these languages, which also ensures equitable access to justice.

Can you share your experience in translating legal documents and, specifically, the challenges you encountered while working on Supreme Court judgments?

One of the prominent issue which I faced was how some terms had origins in European jurisprudence and colonial history. Some of these terms and doctrines also were adopted from American and British jurisprudence. I think we might not necessarily have the cultural similarity to have similar terms/doctrines in our languages. We also realized how despite we are translating the documents in regional languages, it still alienates a large population because of the complexity of the terms involved.

I recently met prominent linguist Ganesh Devy on how to translate those terms which don’t necessarily have an Indian origin and he responded beautifully that we should not go on the language aspect but see what the term translates in terms of community ideas of justice. He also reiterated that we need to train police, judges and administration on laws and its implications in regional languages if we really want to safeguard our citizens.

Instead of focusing on translating it literally to maintain legal purity, we should focus on getting those terms and language which the audience knows and understands. This made me realize that the right to accessible language in regional languages should not mean we create handicap by employing difficult legal terms even within regional languages.

How do you ensure accuracy and maintain the legal nuances of the original content while translating into local/regional languages?

As I mentioned earlier, my baseline of the Hindi language was if my mother, who is not a legal expert, would be able to understand it. I tried my best to think from the perspective of someone who is not an expert on legal concepts. However, since this was a translation project, we also had to stick with the original compendium.

In the next editions, I suggest that we define the doctrines more in easy language because in some cases there is no equivalent language in regional languages. For example the doctrines of ultra vires has not been mentioned in Indian government glossary of legal terms(which is also a phenomenal resource). We used the term ‘शक्तियों से परे; for it. This also means that the work of translation is also creation of knowledge. This requires a sustained effort from all law schools and fraternities when we plan to reimagine legal education for all, particularly in exploring in vernacular mode.

What strategies do you employ to handle the complexity and technicalities of legal language during the translation process?

The only process I followed was thinking if I were a common person who doesn’t understand English and legal complexities, would I be able to understand it? We also resorted to governmental legal dictionaries at times. For example for the term ‘conviction’ we used ‘दोषसिद्धि’ as given in the dictionary. However, we also used little editing in those meanings as well when we thought that the equivalent Hindi term was too complex. Justiciable in the dictionary meant ‘न्यायालय के विचार योग्य’ but we retained the term ‘न्यायसंगत’ which appear in line of justice or justiciable.

There is a good mix of taking calls for some terms to make it accessible while also ensuring legal accuracy. This legal translation warrants more attention to legal experts as the government and courts venture into vernacular justice, we have to think more about creating accessible legal knowledge, an aspect we missed out in English oriented laws and legal jurisprudence.

In your opinion, how does translating legal content contribute to legal literacy and awareness among the local population?

I still don’t have an accurate answer to it but I am optimistic that in future this could be an aspirational initiative as a whole. I am optimistic that even if 100 law students or 50 common persons who were not comfortable with English understood Indian Supreme Court landmark judgments, they would take this knowledge and understanding to more people. Manupatra, Justice Adda and Awaaz can do limited outreach and efforts as a project in isolation. However, projects like these demand law professors, law researchers, and the humanities and political science fraternity to comment on and discuss these projects.

This project demands a critical lens on how even this project might be inaccessible for disabled persons and employ difficult language in Urdu and some parts of Malayalam for local populations. We want people to take this up in even a more accessible way and make it more inclusive.

This is just an attempt and we aim to improve the discourse with growing time. Till the time variety of stakeholders come together this will be limited to an academic siloed effort which I hope it doesn’t’ turn out to be.

What were the learnings to ensure a successful translation project, particularly when working with a team of translators on such critical documents?

It was really difficult to manage operations with five language team members. When we were submitting the project, I found out our Hindi language lead had not done reviewing and editing, which was a little panicky situation for me. I tried to employ as reasonable timelines as I could, but despite that, some interns were a little conservative in following them. However, one big learning which has often worked for me is to have a good mix of students across colleges without any bias to few developed law schools.

One big mistake I made was not following up frequently with language leads at times, which led to team morale going down at times and compromising efficiency. However, all our leads(which were all women language lead), along with some interns, performed so incredibly that this project could be translated into a successful project.

Another learning would be to keep faith in the team members but not being so relaxed that the project goes haywire in terms of timelines. There has to be a balance of trust and caution when doing a project with young law students. I am grateful to everyone who assisted and showed faith in us in shaping this project. I also want to thank to all the interns and language leads who really were the backbone of this project and deserves all the appreciation in the world.