Tamil Language and the Timeless Translations By the Europeans 1543-1887

This book shows how translation served a significant step towards greater interaction and understanding between the people of Tamil country, Sri Lanka and Europe. It dwells upon a wide range of translations of the printed books from Portugal, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, Germany, England and France to Tamil including Bible in Hebrew, Greek, German, Portuguese and Latin. It exhibits how translation became an important and integral part of the missionary work, a policy that encouraged close contacts to reach out the people. Translation from Tamil to Portuguese, Latin, German, Danish, French and English had also been executed without any impediments. The author outlines the patterns of production, circulation and consumption of the printed works and their translations in the early modern age by giving translators their rightful place in the complex networks of authors, patrons, printers, book-sellers, and readers that shaped the market. The introduction of print media constituted an effective and a meaningful step towards Tamil prose development and translation growth. The volume in innumerable ways very subtly explains how the missionaries came to understand Tamil language to have had links with other classical languages like Hebrew, Greek and Latin in the course of Bible translation. Tamil evolved through translations and gained fresh vocabulary and gradually built its own rules for translation. The study also reports the steps made in the translation from Sanskrit, Marathi, Bengali and Telugu into Tamil and expresses the significance.