The Monsoon Session of the parliament is set to commence on July 18. For the first time, Rajya Sabha MPs will be able to speak in any of the 22 Indian languages listed in the 8th Schedule of the Constitution.
Earlier, the Rajya Sabha arranged Simultaneous Interpretation Service for 12 out of the 22 Scheduled languages. These include Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
The five languages that include Dogri, Kashmiri, Konkani, Santhali, Sindhi and Maithili can also be spoken in from the forthcoming session. These languages were not a part of the simultaneous interpretation facility previously. The Rajya Sabha has recently organized Simultaneous Interpretation Services for the aforementioned languages.
The interpreters were formally initiated into the Parliament on Tuesday by the Vice President of India M. Venkaiah Naidu.
For Bodo, Maithili, Manipuri, Marathi and Nepali, the Secretariat has deployed the Lok Sabha interpreters.
As reported by a news site, Naidu said, “I have always felt that mother tongue is the natural medium to convey our feelings and thoughts without any retention. In a multilingual setting such as Parliament, members must not feel handicapped or inferior to others due to language constraint. That’s why I was keen to have simultaneous interpretation facility for all the 22 Scheduled languages. I am glad this is becoming a reality from the coming Monsoon Session.”
According to a Rajya Sabha official, the Secretariat has made special efforts to identify and train the interpreters.
