New Delhi, April 25 -- In early March, I was in a small room at a large conference with a dozen language nerds. While I was in that room, the grin on my face was the equivalent of someone else's face while watching the glorious comeback of BTS. Why lie? I find it hard to decide whether I like Nam-Joon or the average language nerd more. This was a comparative literature organisation so everyone present had a thrilling language pair or two up their sleeve. At an earlier session, a PhD student who worked in Arabic and Malayalam and I guffawed at an anecdote that appealed to Malayali refuseniks. In another, I watched one of my favourite translation theorists read out many versions of the opening lines of a Spanish novel-each one translated by...