Professor Reddiar has identified the objectives of the learning of the mother-tongue from the mass of general objectives which hold good for all languages. He has rightly emphasised the role of the mother-tongue in providing wholesome emotional sustenance to the growing learners. The distinction between a foreign language and the mother-tongue seems to lie in the possibility of greater emotionalisation through the mother-tongue. The mother-tongue patently serves the functional purpose of communication ; but a subtle principle implied in its character, which is often missed is, that it conveys something most intimate to the life and experience of the learner, while the experiences gained through a foreign language are exotic and vicarious, though sensible by the process of comparison and imagination. The art of translation must remain an imperfect art even with the most perfect of multi-linguists because, while words may be translatable for practical purposes, most concepts must remain untranslated. It is not the perfect nature of the translation. in any accredited translation of a great work that helps one to see the beauty of the original in the translation. The superior education and imagination of the reader and the circumstances of his being a good student of the original make him see in the translation what does not really exist : viz., the beauty of the original. G. U. Pope's translation of the Kural, for instance, can never be as perfect as Tiruvalluvar’s Tamil Kural. But if Pope is remembered better than any other translator of the Kural it is because the translation has literary value in English. It seems to be an axiom that to enjoy a work of literature there can be no short-circuiting of the process by reading it in translation. . There is as much difference between an original work and its best translation as there is between an actual visit to a place and seeing the place in a three-dimensional picture.
