What could be Malayalam for gaslighting? A workshop tries to ‘create’ new age terms

#MeToo, slut shaming and trigger - among other contemporary feminist and gender-based terms - don’t have a Malayalam equivalents and are generally written out as English terms in the local script, in the written language. Sensing this shortcoming, Kochi-based NGO Raising Our Voices, which works in gender issues, recently hosted a seminar to workshop Malayalam translations for phrases such as toxic masculinity, gaslighting, gender pay cap, weaponised incompetency and manspreading.

“These are news words, formed to suit particular situations that have passed on to common usage and we don’t have appropriate Malayalam phrases for them that convey the essence. We have faced difficulty in translating these words in our work and that’s how we decided to hold a workshop to brainstorm,” says Sajitha Rasheed, one of the founders of the organisation.

The programme included Malayalam language research scholars, lexiconographers, journalists, teachers and more. “The participants had a healthy thrashing out of ideas, and one of the things that came up in the discussion was that words must be ‘coined’ with inclusivity, keeping in mind not just gender, but also caste and class,” she says.

The next plan of action is to hand over the list of words to the media and social media to possibly bring it into common parlance. “We were open to suggestions about what more can be done. A couple of language researchers who had attended the workshop suggested that we could forward this list to the Kerala Bhasha Institute academic publishing house and get it published,” says Sajitha.

‘We learnt to look at the various thoughts that go into creating words’
Syam Sree Kumar and Abhirami SR run a social media page called Malayalifying, where they try to come up with local equivalents that don’t already exist for English words, such as video and hook. They felt that the workshop offered them some pointers. “Everyone was working in a time bound manner and it was a good exercise for us. Also, after creating words, the participating groups explained how they came up with them, and it was interesting to see the different approaches and thoughts that went into a word. It opened up our minds to the various ways to look at creating words,” says Syam, an engineer by profession.


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