Sometimes when people appear on this site who really seem to know how to translate words or names from other languages to the written Sanskrit, there are words or names for which there are no equivalents in Sanskrit to which they can be translated that they mention. I am wondering if there is any sort of criteria or rule to be considered for those words or names that cannot be translated? Thank you!

Clough

Any takers here?

rodandy12

I'll take a crack. How would one translate "radio" into Sanskrit? Obviously, there are many words in use today that have no corresponding word in Sanskrit.

It seems to me there are several choices here, but I do not know what is officially acceptable with Sanskrit scholars. One choice would be to take a phonetic spelling of "radio" into Sanskrit. This would add a new word. Another choice would be to create a phrase in Sanskrit in accepted Sanskrit words that describes the modern word. I'm told (but I have never confirmed it) that the French have a government organization that reviews all official government documents to make sure all words used are French. It takes a short paragraph to describe in French words the single word radio.

drkpp

Please understand this:
The name remains the same, let the language be any.
It is not translated but transliterated i.e. written using
the letters from the other language. E.g. "Suresh" is my
friend. His name means The King of Gods in Sanskrit.
When I call him, I simply call him Hellow "Suresh" & not
as "Hellow King of Gods".

Words which do not have a direct equivalent in Sanskrit are translated as per their meanings.

Clough

Thanks!

So, are you saying that the letters are more important than the actual meaning of the words? I'm still confused...

firmbeliever

Clough,
I think when it comes to translating some languages like Sanskrit,Arabic,Hindhi etc,there are some words or a single word in these languages that when translated into english might be actually a phrase.
Or an English word translated may be more than one word in any of these languages.Sometimes some words in these languages have no direct meaning in English and it has to be transliterated into similar meaning words or phrases.

Sanskrit was a language used for religious /vedic/ scholarly texts and the words used are many times poetic and may have multiple meanings.
I think a parellel can be drawn like how Hebrew/Arabic religious texts are difficult to be directly translated into English,the same way Sanskrit translations have many barriers.

drkpp

Devanagari script (The Script of City of Gods) used by Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi & Nepali languages is a phonetic script i.e. the words are written as they are spoken. The actual pronunciation & the spelling are always the same. E.g. for the English word "knowledge", the phonetic spelling would be "nolej".

Does this makes it clear?