Thirukkural translations: A sacred text from the town of peacocks –Mayilâpûr India

Translating a literary text is a challenging task, mainly when there is a great social distance between the involved languages. Aiming at a further translation of the sacred poetic Indian text named Thirukkural into Portuguese language, this study had the purpose of collecting some previous data about the existing translations of it, such as: what languages, which style (prose or verse), how many translations in English. The work was mainly based on the chronologic study of Rajagaram (1730-2015). Besides the obtained results, we concluded that, in adopting the approach of ‘micro-translation’, in which the translation represents the meaning as well the goal, the most suitable form for translating this text can be in prose, whereas the fidelity is welcome.