While many senior executives continue to talk about the "voice of the customer," few demonstrate their commitment to this concept by spending time with customers. Many continue to use their intuition or `golden gut' in their attempt to provide superior customer value. Unfortunately, `senior executive intuition' is rarely attuned to the needs of their customers. While the competitive environment continues to intensify, executives have cut back on the time devoted to customers just when it should be increasing. This article discusses the need for senior executives to spend time with customers and provides examples of the benefits that this approach will provide.

Translation is an activity that is both simple and complex. It is of various hues, practiced for a variety of purposes. The language in which a text is first written is the Source Language. The language into which the original is transferred is the Target Language. This activity is taken up with specific purposes varying from the utilitarian and immediately useful, to the aesthetically satisfying. At one end of the scale of purposes, there is practicality and imaginative appreciation, leading to indescribable joy at the other. Grammatical systems and categories are unique to any single language but elemental feelings and emotions are not unique to any one language. Where factual translation can be made into a science, literary rendering is not amenable to a `theory', which per se is rigid, rigorous, and for that reason, `scientific'. Hence, there could be no universally applicable theory for creative translation, which is a creative art more complex than writing itself. The best way to excel is to cultivate this with imaginative appreciation and then utilize the insights gleaned in actual practice.

At a National Seminar on Literary Translation in New Delhi some years ago, an eminent litterateur, by then a Jnanpith laureate, raised a laugh by mentioning Bottom being `translated'. He might not have intended to sneer at or deride translation or translators, but some had not found the intro very palatable.

The COD lists four meanings to the word `translate', derived from Latin `translatus'. First, it is transferring the sense of a word, group of words or a sentence into another language. Second, it is to convey or introduce an idea or principle from one language to another. Third, it is to infer or declare the significance of, or interpret signs etc. Fourth, it is to convey, transform or retransmit. Shakespeare intended transform but Quince too, like Bottom, wished to excel in that eminently enjoyable horseplay. There are translations and translations each having a distinct function to perform ,in knowledge dissemination, information conveyance or furnishing a means for literary exegesis and in interpretation.

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