How Stories Carry a University Across Languages

University admission forms often ask a familiar question: “How did you hear about this university?” The expected answers are usually predictable: a website, a friend, social media, an advertisement or a recruiter. But what if the answer is something the university never expected? What if someone first encounters a university not through official promotion, but through a story written decades earlier in another language?

That question came back to me recently when Prothom Alo, one of Bangladesh’s major Bengali-language newspapers, published a shortened Bangla version of my April 28 Spectrum article, “The Story That Made NDSU Known in Bangladesh.” The Bangla version appeared under the title “The Campus Bangladesh Knows Through the Writings of Humayun Ahmed.” The original piece explored NDSU’s connection with Humayun Ahmed, one of the most beloved writers in Bengali literature, who once studied chemistry here as a doctoral student. For many people in Bangladesh, NDSU became familiar not through university promotion, but through Humayun Ahmed’s writing. Some readers knew about Fargo and NDSU from his stories long before they ever looked the university up on a map.

What fascinated me about the Bangla publication was not simply that the article had been translated. The two versions speak to very different audiences. For readers of The Spectrum, NDSU is familiar, but Humayun Ahmed may not be. The original article therefore had to explain why this former doctoral student matters so deeply to millions of Bengali readers. In Bangladesh, the situation is almost exactly reversed. Humayun Ahmed needs little introduction, while NDSU is the unfamiliar part of the story. A Bangla reader may immediately understand the cultural importance of his name, but may need context for NDSU, Fargo and the history connecting the writer to this campus. The same story cannot remain exactly the same when it moves from one language to another. The focus of the story changes depending on who is reading it.

That difference made me think more carefully about what translation does in public writing. We often think of translation as replacing words in one language with words that have the same meaning in another. Still, when a piece reaches a different group of readers, the writer may also need to change what is explained and emphasized. Writers and editors must decide what readers already know, what requires explanation, what details can be shortened and what may matter differently in a new cultural setting. A name that needs several sentences of introduction in Fargo may need none in Dhaka. NDSU may need no explanation for a North Dakota reader, but it may need more context for a Bangla reader. Translation, in that sense, also becomes a way of seeing the story anew: deciding where readers enter it, what they already know and what context they need to understand its significance.

There is a larger lesson here for universities. Institutions understandably invest substantial energy in explaining their value through research, rankings, innovation, student success and economic impact. They build websites, publish reports and develop recruitment campaigns designed to make the university visible beyond the campus. Yet visibility does not always begin with official communication. Sometimes a university becomes meaningful in another country through a former student, a memoir, a novel, a family story or a memory that circulates long after the institution itself has stopped noticing it. These connections may be hard to measure, but they still matter. In some cases, they may create stronger recognition than any planned campaign because they emerge from lived experience rather than institutional promotion. Humayun Ahmed’s connection with NDSU shows that a university can become known abroad in ways it never planned. But seeing my article move from The Spectrum to Prothom Alo made me notice something different. In Fargo, readers begin with NDSU and encounter Humayun Ahmed. In Bangladesh, readers begin with Humayun Ahmed and encounter NDSU. The two versions tell the same story, but they approach it from different directions.