Translation, Script and Orality: Becoming a Language of State traces debates around transcription/translation in Konkani that eventually contoured the development of the language towards nationalist or state-seeking forms. Though the book is structured around contemporary linguistic states such as Goa, Pinto argues for a focus on aspects of language that deviate from the nationalist literary norm. The present volume is structured as a long essay, interspersed with excerpts from the introductions and prefaces to transcribed/translated texts. The historically significant extracts demonstrate the shifts in perspectives with regard to transcription and translation, and reveal how what was once termed a dialect, acquired the symbolic attributes of cultural dominance necessitated by nationalist discourse.

Rochelle Pinto is an independent researcher. She has held research fellowships at the L'Institut d'Etudes Avancées, Nantes (2019–20), the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (2015–2017), and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi (2014–2015). She taught at Delhi University, FLAME, Pune and at Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bengaluru, where she co-directed a two-year project, 'Archive and Access', funded by the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, Bombay (2009–2011). Her first book, Between Empires – Print and Politics in Goa (2007) was awarded the Hira Lal Gupta Research award (2009). Her other publications include, ‘The Foral in the history of the comunidades of Goa’ in Journal of World History (June 2018), 'Govinda Samanta, or eluding ethnography in the colonial novel', in Novel Formations (2019), and 'Settling the land – the village and the threat of capital in the novel in Goa' in Commodities and Affect (2017). She co-authored 'Archives and the State', an ethnographic account of the state of archives as an online publication for the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru.