NEW DELHI:The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) is on a recruitment spree to hire Hindi interpreters to promote the use of that language at official meetings.
Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi indicated that Hindi would get prominence during his international meetings, the MEA has been trying to find suitable interpreters.
Last week, it gave a call for recruiting Hindi interpreters as consultants for an initial period of two years. The selected candidates would be required to work as interpreters during bilateral/ multilateral meetings of international visitors/delegations to India or abroad.
Another part of the job would be to “summarise and translate published material from Hindi to English or English to Hindi in the areas assigned to them, as it appears in media or academic journals”.
The MEA would give additional weightage if applicants had worked as interpreters in the Lok Sabha or Rajya Secretariat as both have a dedicated pool to do simultaneous interpretation in Hindi and English during proceedings.
The age limit for applicants is 63 years as of September 1.After deputing senior joint secretaries to do interpretation on Modi’s visits, the MEA had last year honed in on two regulars -- MEA Director in West Africa and French speaker Neelakshi Saha and Russian language expert in the Eurasian Division Shipra Ghosh. As they translate into English, there was urgent need to recruit more Hindi experts.
The use of Hindi for the MEA’s regular paperwork is already on the rise. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had expressed surprise at getting a three-page Hindi note in a file forwarded to her.