In a first, a Manipuri woman has translated saint poet Thiruvalluvar’s ‘Tirukkural’ from Tamil into the Manipuri language. The book titled ‘Tirukkural in Manipuri’ was translated by Soibam Rebika Devi, a resource person with the Central Institute of Indian languages (CIIL), Mysore, and published by the Central Institute of Classical Tamil, Chennai. The book is all set to be released by July-end at Imphal by Okram Ibobi Singh, Chief Minister of Manipur.
Soibam (36), picked up Tamil only 8-9 years ago.
She wasted no time in joining the Southern Regional Language Centre at CIIL in Mysore to do her diploma in Tamil. She did her MA in Linguistics and Translation in Annamalai University and doctorate in Linguistics from MKU. In a few years, she took up the Tirukkural and worked for more than a year-and-a-half to translate the entire 1,330 kurals. Each couplet in Tamil text has its transliteration and translation below, into Manipuri (Meiteilon) in the Bengali script.
N Nadaraja Pillai, former Controller of Examinations, CIIL, termed Soibam’s achievement as spectacular. Manipuri and Tamil belong to two different families of languages. Translating the works from such a language into another is not an easy job. Further, Tirukkural is difficult as some of the words and phrases are difficult to translate.