The Ashoka Centre for Translation (ACT) is established with a view to foster, nurture, and foreground India’s multilingual ethos. It hopes to unlock knowledge and aid its dissemination through translation. Given the urgency to make knowledge available and democratic, the Centre does not confine itself only to English. In fact, it aims to translate material from many Indian languages into many other Indian languages, including English. Thus, the received binaries of (one) source and (one) target do not characterize the aims of the Centre. A range of texts from literary and popular, political and scientific, and oral and written domains—all of these are important to the Centre’s vision.

Professors Rita Kothari and Arunava Sinha would like to invite, mentor, and train aspiring translators, thereby expanding the community of translators. The Centre’s activities will also be accompanied by theoretical reflections emerging from the act of translating in a multilingual society.