Translation of an English Passage into Hindi

What the official syllabus says

Main Written Examination, Paper II: Hindi and Hindi Essay (in Devnagri script):

• (i) Translation of English passage into Hindi.

Topics in detail

Principles of translation

• Translating the meaning and spirit of the passage, not word for word
• Keeping the content complete: nothing added, nothing left out
• Natural, idiomatic Hindi that reads as if written in Hindi
• Keeping the tone of the original: formal, narrative, argumentative or descriptive

Sentence structure

• English subject-verb-object order and Hindi subject-object-verb order
• Breaking long English sentences into two or more Hindi sentences where needed
• Rendering the English passive voice: when to keep it and when to make it active
• Tense and aspect: matching English tenses with the right Hindi verb forms
• Gender and number agreement of verbs and adjectives in Hindi
• Correct use of postpositions in place of English prepositions
• Relative clauses (who, which, that) in Hindi

Words and terms

• Standard Hindi equivalents of administrative and official terms (for example, for notification, department, district, budget, policy)
• Hindi equivalents of common terms of economics, science and law
• When to keep a proper noun or technical term in its usual form
• Rendering English idioms by their meaning or by a matching Hindi idiom
• Numbers, dates, units and abbreviations

Correctness

• Correct spelling in Devanagari, including the nasal marks and the half letters
• Punctuation in Hindi: the vertical-line full stop and the other marks
• Revising the translation to remove literal, awkward phrasing

Practice material

• News reports and editorials on public affairs
• Official notices and short government texts
• Passages on social, economic and scientific subjects

Overlaps

Reading the English passage closely uses the skills of English and English Essay.