If you thought your job was hard, spare a thought for Rahul Gandhi’s translator.
Rahul Gandhi’s Tamil translator has fainted during his whirlwind tour of Tamil Nadu. Tamil publication Dinakaran reported that a college professor, Mohammad Imran, who’d been translating Rahul Gandhi’s speeches in real time from English to Tamil, felt dizzy and collapsed in Erode district. Imran, 35, was subsequently rushed to hospital.
Mohammad Imran had just translated Rahul Gandhi’s Erode speech, in which he’d bizarrely claimed that if India used its farmers and workers, it wouldn’t need an army, navy or air force, because China wouldn’t then have the guts to enter India.
It’s unclear whether it was the rigors of Gandhi’s schedule or the mental effort required to translate his speeches that caused his translator to faint, but Rahul Gandhi has been lobbing some curve balls at his translators during his Tamil Nadu visit. Just yesterday, Rahul Gandhi had declared to a crowd that if it was alright to say that Tamil Nadu was India, then one must also say India was Tamil Nadu. “Tamil Nadu is India, India is Tamil Nadu, but India is not Tamil Nadu”, he’d said, which had caused his bemused translator to pause, and ask him to repeat what he’d just said. As Gandhi had again repeated the inanity, the bewildered translator had begrudgingly translated the sentence into Tamil.
This isn’t the only time Rahul Gandhi has been lost in translation in Tamil Nadu. Throughout the 2019 campaign, he’d struggled with his Tamil translators, with translators unable to understand what he was saying, or making up things that he’d never said. This happened so often that compilation videos were made of his exploits with translators in the state.
And with a translator now physically fainting while translating Rahul Gandhi’s speeches, it appears that the best and brightest in Tamil Nadu are simply unable to keep up with Rahul Gandhi’s pearls of wisdom.
