Translating birds

Many Buddhist mythological texts speak of a bird called a haṃsa in Pali and Sanskrit. Finding it curious that this is often left untranslated or noted as a goose or a swan, I decided to take a closer look. From Wikipedia:

Jean Vogel, in 1952, questioned if hamsa is indeed a swan, because according to Dutch ornithologists George Junge and E.D. van Oort he consulted, swans were rare in modern India while bar-headed geese (Anser indicus) were common. According to Vogel, Western and Indian scholars may have preferred translating hamsa from Sanskrit to swan as the indigenous goose appears plump while the swan (and, Vogel adds, the flamingo) appears more graceful.

Some have criticised Vogel’s view as being over-reliant on artistic representations from south India and Sri Lanka, where the white swan is rare. American ornithologist Paul Johnsgard, in 2010, stated that mute swans (Cygnus Olor) do migrate to the northwestern Himalayan region of India every winter, migrating some 1000 miles each way. Similarly, the British ornithologist Peter Scott, in his Key to the Wildfowl of the World (1957), states that northwestern India is one of the winter migration homes for mute swans, the others being Korea and the Black Sea. Grewal, Harvey and Pfister, in 2003, state that the mute swan is “a vagrant mainly in Pakistan but also northwestern India” and include a map marking their distribution. Asad Rahmani and Zafar-ul Islam, in their 2009 book, describe the three species of swans and 39 species of ducks and geese found in India.

Dave stated, “the present position according to Hume is that Swans do not occur anywhere within Indian limits outside the Himalayas except in the extreme North-West”, and suggested that they were perhaps more common in the “hoary past.”

This serves as a powerful example of the complexity of translating across centuries and cultures, the limits of just how much we can know about the other, and academia can really get stuck on some arcane points.