When Parliament is in session, about 100 people enter soundproof booths overlooking the House chamber. Ranging from young graduates to retired government employees, these people have quite a mandate: broadcasting the proceedings of both Houses in 23 different languages, including most of India’s official languages as well as Sanskrit.
Simultaneous interpreting is a precise art – it requires listening to a speaker and translating their words into another language in real time. The process is so mentally demanding that the interpreters change places every 30 minutes. The word order in most sentences is different in English than in most Indian languages, forcing interpreters to speak sentences quickly, skip some phrases, and do all this while listening to the next sentence.
When the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman gave the Union Budget speech In early February there were two ways to listen in English: for MPs and those in the public gallery, a pair of headphones and a dial allowed them to hear translations in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and 20 other Indian languages; For those who were not in Parliament, there were live feeds on YouTube.
Vineet (name changed) along with three colleagues take turns translating Lok Sabha conversations from English to South Indian languages in real time. A humanities college graduate and interested in politics, Vineet visited the Lok Sabha website in 2023 at the same time that the lower house of Parliament was advertising for vacancies in a role that foreshadowed how Parliament interprets: in all languages, at once.
The work requires speed, presence of mind, and the ability to concentrate on two activities at the same time. This is especially challenging when it comes to sentence structure. For example, in English, the most common usage seen is subject-verb-object, while in Hindi it is subject-object-verb.
now in 23 languages
The demand for simultaneous translation was first raised on May 19, 1952, within the first week of the first session of Parliament. A member from Andhra Pradesh asked then Speaker Ganesh Mavalankar whether translation of speeches delivered in any language other than English and Hindi would be provided, Parliament records show.
Mavalankar scoffed at this suggestion. “We should not raise imaginary difficulties,” he said, adding, “There may be real cases also… The practice in those cases would be that the member who wishes to speak would give his version and we would have to look at it and get it verified from some good source familiar with that language.” This is a form of sequential translation. But Mavalankar hoped that members would generally speak in a language that everyone in the House could understand. English remained the predominant language spoken on the floor.
During the five sessions of the Provisional Parliament (January 1950-May 1952), Hindi was spoken for only 146 minutes. By the 1960s, Hindi speakers were in majority in both houses and the language was slowly changing. By 1963, work began towards setting up simultaneous translation facilities.
In the decades that followed, other languages faced a barrier: interpreters were available for Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu and some other languages, but MPs were required to inform the Speaker, in writing, a day in advance that they planned to speak in their language. The Secretariat would then be able to ensure that an interpreter was available. From 2023 onwards, it has become common for MPs to speak in their own language, with real-time translation available for all others.
“MPs are very happy with elected representatives who can now count on hearing proceedings in their own language throughout the day,” says Vineet. “He visited us at the booth the first few days and encouraged us.” At a closed parliamentary committee hearing, where interpreters were also deployed, Vineet recalls, “An MP came up to me and said, ‘You have improved a lot!'”
Many MPs from Vineet’s state spoke in their own language during the debate on the ‘Developed India’ – Employment Guarantee and Livelihood Mission (Rural) (VB-G RAM G) Bill, 2025, as rural employment was electorally important.
Many Indians speak at least two languages fluently. Nevertheless, simultaneous interpreting as a profession has rarely been trusted outside Parliament, which is one of the most prestigious positions in terms of jobs. Vineet remembers an “oration” test and an interpretation drill as a part of his initial assessment, followed by about five weeks of training on recorded speeches.
Parliament does not make recordings of explanations available on demand. The live feed is taken down as soon as the House adjourns for the day. A review of some feeds during the Budget session shows that it is not uncommon for interpreters to stumble, and the Lok Sabha Secretariat says in a disclaimer that the service is provided for convenience only.
at work
Ram Kesarwani, a veteran of India’s simultaneous translation industry, says the “pool” of interpreters working across the country is just around 100. Kesarwani’s company, Translation India, has been doing translation together since 2004. He says demand has always been limited to larger events and the budget to hire them.
Kesarwani says more than half of the contract interpreters added to Parliament over the past two years to provide interpretation in almost all of India’s official languages have worked with his firm, or been trained directly by him.
“Since 2014, the business has absolutely grown, growing five or six times,” says Kesarwani. He says, “In 2004, when I started, I realized that equipment and even foreign language interpreters were not available in India. Indian language interpreters were also not available because only Parliament had interpreters.” “So if simultaneous interpretation was required at a conference, meeting or seminar, requests were made to Parliament for its own staff. Sometimes even to different universities for foreign languages.”
Ram Kesarwani, Founder of Translation India. File photo: Special arrangement
When Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin called a meeting with the Chief Ministers of Kerala, Karnataka, Punjab and Telangana in Chennai, Kesarvani’s independent interpreters, held in a hotel conference room, transcribed each speaker’s remarks in the languages of the respective Chief Ministers.
Even as the simultaneous interpretation industry has seen a relative boom, he says it remains a challenging place to work, as gigs can be hard to come by, and demand is seasonal. It grows from October to February, when the weather is favorable for large gatherings. “It doesn’t make for a secure career,” says Kesarwani.
While Parliament has permanent interpreters who receive a salary with benefits, most interpreters working there today were hired on contract, and are paid when the House is in session.
The per day salary in Parliament for a contractual employee is around ₹6,000. For conferences it can range between ₹15,000 and ₹35,000, with most events falling somewhere in between.
The group of interpreters also includes the better paid group – international language interpreters, translating for Prime Ministers and multilateral conferences. At a small gathering of interpreters in South Delhi earlier this week, some of the most experienced participants in this ecosystem talked about why the industry remains small.
a lack and a push
Simultaneous interpreting is an emerging field in Indian languages. However, for international languages it has been around for a bit longer. “The Ministry of External Affairs used to have a dedicated cadre of interpreters,” says Anil Dhingra, a retired Spanish professor and simultaneous interpreter, who got a sabbatical in 1975 while studying at the Indian Embassy in Madrid, and has since had the opportunity to work in many bilateral and multilateral programmes. “Now they have stopped recruiting people in that cadre, and instead, train Indian Foreign Service officers abroad in a foreign language.” Now, he says, the Ministry of External Affairs maintains an approved panel of interpreters who can be called for foreign languages. In the post-World War II era, interpretation became a necessity along with the establishment of a diplomatic community as more and more nations gained independence from colonial rule. The United Nations was established and a multilingual international scene also emerged. The Nuremberg trials to prosecute Nazi war crimes saw a particular need for simultaneous interpretation.
Anil Dhingra. File photo: Special arrangement.
Dhingra feels that the Indian government did not pay much attention to interpreters within India. “For the Non-Aligned Movement summit in 1983, he got an entire team of conference interpreters together from abroad through a British agency.” He admits that at that time India did not have the number of interpreters required for an event of such a large scale, but there should have been efforts to train Indian interpreters alongside established professionals. He says that there are still no courses that provide training in simultaneous translation in Indian languages.
Despite these obstacles, the interpreting pool is “slowly” growing, says French-English interpreter Prachi Chawla. “There is a new demand for Hindi-Gujarati and other such Indian language pairs,” he said, citing a LinkedIn job opening circulated among interpreters.
Entry of AI
People had another way to listen to Sitharaman’s budget speech by logging into the free-to-air news channel’s regional language feed on YouTube, where Bengaluru start-up Sarvam AI was dubbing the speech in Hindi and other languages in Sitharaman’s own voice. The company was using its latest translation model for Indian languages. This was the first AI-powered interpretation of parliamentary proceedings.
The broadcast was delayed by two minutes, giving the start-up enough time to punctuate Sitharaman’s sentences, and allowing the translation model to produce translations that would run no longer than her original comments.
Machine translation in Indian languages is improving thanks to government efforts like the National Language Translation Mission (Bashini) and private efforts by companies like Sarvam.
Kesarwani claims that some recordings of the Parliament’s consultant interpreters were being used to improve the speech. After all, translation models get better when they have more data. The lack of online texts in Indian languages is a major reason why the quality of Indian language translations lags behind stronger languages such as European or East Asian languages among online users.
The AI wave has led to companies like Sarvam receiving unprecedented support in developing large language models (LLM) and translation models that surpass their predecessors. Kesarwani says that machine translation for Indian languages is rapidly improving. “I think it will be absolutely fine in the next year or two.” They have also started providing AI-enabled services as a part of their offerings. At a party for simultaneous interpreters, a fellow guest scolds him for doing so.
At the party, there is music, and many professionals say that other types of skills that require coordinated movement, such as playing the piano, coincide with the interpreter’s skills at work.
Kesarwani has been doing this for 35 years, and says that those who built careers on interpreting did so with international languages. “They are close to retirement, and new graduates have not come into interpretation on a large scale.”
For some time, Parliament will need real-life interpreters, like big events, but AI is set to find a place in the interpretation industry, he is sure.
Shobhana K. With inputs from Nair
aroon.dep@thehindu.co.in
Edited by Sunalini Mathew
