8 February 2016
Translation, as Salman Rushdie has noted, has its roots in the Latin for "bearing across." Rushdie - born in Mumbai, or Bombay as it was known then - acknowledges the common fear that something always gets lost in translation, yet he hopes, too, that something can be gained.
In Rushdie's native India, where there are 22 official languages and easily 100 more spoken in dozens of communities from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, publishers have a bounty of languages to get lost in and to gain from. The emergence of smartphones and tablets - enabling so-called "mobile reading" - promises to make India a nation of translations
