in another hue
Apr. 6th, 2022 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiA...while earlier, what is time, both superborb and presumenothing posted very interesting and insightful discussions of translation; I’ve been meaning to post something on the subject myself, but it turns out I just have a collection of quotations and random comments, at great length, rather than any actual solid points to make. That said, in hopes of providing some interest and stimulating my own brain, please find what I got here below.
To follow in Seiden-sama’s grumpy footsteps a little, my impression is that some amateur translators tend to reinvent the wheel to some extent, at various levels, in particular with regard to how faithful a (literary) translation should or should not be, in terms of everything from articles and m-dashes to metaphors and character names. (I’ve worked, reluctantly, with someone who felt that anything not translated exactly word for word was a dangerously free translation; likewise I gave up on reading the Japanese Harry Potter editions very early on because of their painfully close translation, in some places right down to the punctuation, which meant that there was no attempt to come up with translations that would have been funny or pointed in Japanese rather than just replicating the English terms sound for sound).
I don’t know enough languages well enough to come up with good examples, but for instance a good Japanese translation from the English will not only omit the first person pronoun altogether when it isn’t needed in the target text, but will translate it suitably for what the character would be using in the context (Japanese has a lot of pronouns to choose from compared to English), rather than sticking mechanically to a single one and putting it in everywhere English does. When translating technical manuals from Japanese to English, a lot of translators tend to reflect the Japanese phrasing with “Please...” every third sentence, which I delete ruthlessly when I’m proofreading them: it’s a set of directions for using a tractor or an electric actuator or whatever, not a polite request.
I learned about technical translation at the company I used to work for (they still send me freelance work) and was lucky that a couple of 先輩 there were willing to teach me from scratch, in terms of both technical vocabulary/usage (I am the most humanities person ever, and there are still a lot of terms that I can translate but not actually define) and translation software. For technical work and occasionally other projects, I use CAT software (Trados); it’s not machine translation, but it remembers for you what you’ve already translated and keeps track of glossaries as well, thus saving effort and enhancing consistency. Worse than useless on the whole for literary translation (although I’ve read about someone translating one of those fantasy doorstoppers who used it to keep straight all the random proper nouns, so as to avoid writing about the Crown of Pristine Virtue in one chapter and the Pure Goodness Crown in the next). Technical translation is good for ruthless accuracy and bad for literary translation in the wider sense, from the sentence-by-sentence habits inculcated by Trados to the automatic tendency to represent the source language as faithfully as possible, which can stifle imaginative translation in places where it’s appropriate.
It’s also good for learning to track down the correct term or name or quotation through stubborn online research. I cut my technical-translation teeth on a huge online catalog of everything under the sun, including everyday goods as well as industrial stuff, and I spent HOURS following threads of possibility through Google mazes to figure out the English names of obscure tools or how a bizarre phonetic phrase should be spelled; useful thereafter for finding out how to read obscure names and place names, the actual official text of laws and quotations, you name it.
Non-technical stuff is mostly more fun, I will admit. I’m not a literary translator professionally, but the academic papers and related stuff I work on can be exciting. I went through my work over the last three months and made a list of some of the more interesting and/or representative content: some checking work for a book on left-wing writers in wartime (this one came to me from a grad school friend); technical stuff including measuring instruments for industrial plants, motion control devices, and machine tool parts; papers on teaching traditional poems in high school [this one included several examples of the students’ own haiku, so I amused myself by translating them in proper 5-7-5 format], fathers’ non-standard work schedules, gold-mining villages in Indonesia, company employees who travel the world while working, and the history of Catholic education in Japan; in-house awards for innovation at a major beverage company; an interview with a young woman who farms rice in West Japan; and contemporary documents regarding a Japanese painting exhibition in 19th-century Paris.
okay, I like my job sometimes. Puns and wordplay of all kinds are a huge translator’s headache but also a delight. One I remember thinking well of from a long time back was a line from a Margaret Mahy kids’ book translated into Japanese: the original was something like “she didn’t even read it, she crumpled it up until it was more litter than letter,” which became 手紙より捨て紙, tegami yori sutegami, more scrap-paper than a letter. Then I was just reading a Miura Shion novel in which some high school boys who have come to a well-known tourist spot to draw the scenery notice the large number of couples cuddling in the vicinity. “This gives a whole new meaning to shasei,” one of them says. He’s playing on 写生, drawing from life, and 射精, ejaculating (in the non-dialogue-tag sense), both pronounced the same way. I decided the best translation would be something like “I thought we came here to sketch, but this place looks pretty sketchy.” The Japanese version of Diana Wynne Jones’ The Ogre Downstairs (translated by Harashima Fumiyo) does a neat thing. Among the weird and magical events in that book, there’s a “dragon’s teeth” event in which a magical motorcycle gang springs up full grown (okay, it’s a long story). In the original version, they speak in Classical Greek, or rather in Greek letters spelling out suitable English phrases like “Let me at ‘em!” and “Think you can hit my mate on the head, do you?” It’s a lovely visual/linguistic joke. In the Japanese edition, they speak in pseudo-classical Chinese characters, which is not only a linguistic parallel of sorts but actually a thing in Japanese gang graffiti, at least for something like the well-known 夜露死苦 for よろしく.
I just this week saw in the bookstore a beautiful four-volume set of the Tale of Genji, translated back into modern Japanese from the Waley English translation. Now there’s a thesis waiting to happen. (Also I wonder why they chose Waley and not Seiden-sama or Royall Tyler; just because he remains the best-known in Japan?).
I’m very fond of Zen Cho’s short stories, in which the characters tend to speak Malaysian-English; I can’t imagine how this could be effectively translated into another language (of these, “Prudence and the Dragon” has a Spanish version online and my very limited Spanish suggests that the translator didn’t really manage it, does anyone read Spanish better than me and can opine?). Likewise for regional dialects in Japanese, like my old favorites, Asano Atsuko’s Battery series, mostly in Okayama dialect, or the Hiko Tanaka books in Osaka-ben and so on, where half the sense of the dialogue is in the feel of the dialect; how to put this across without the specifics of the phrasing and its cultural connotations? (Are there Chinese novels, web- or otherwise, which make use of regional dialects, and if so how do they get across things like changed pronunciation?)
My Yuriko thing: a translation project I’ve been working on since I was in grad school if not even before then, letters and diaries by a Japanese woman writer in the 1920s; I tend to try, when translating them, to aim roughly at the tone and phrasing of the transwar diaries I read in English (without the specifically British phraseology, especially since Yuriko learned her English in New York and would, if she had been writing in English, have tended to the American). I haven’t been scrupulous about sticking to idioms and words exactly of the time period, although if I ever get these things into a state for publication, maybe I should. Easier than some to find expression for, because she’s so verbal—she puts what she’s thinking and feeling into words, often a lot of words! which gives the translator more ground to stand on, as it were, rather than having to express extraverbal atmosphere (one reason I do not have any ambition to translate poetry seriously). Exciting and frustrating.
A comment I left on superborb’s post which, although pretty off-the-cuff, I’m kind of pleased with: can we have a three R’s of translation, to wit respect, research, and readability? I feel like that would cover most of the issues with literary translation.
Sorry for this endless blather. Let me know if it brings anything to mind!
The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all the other essentials have already been provided, so he can just sit down and write his ass off.
Languages...are similar and we can at least imagine how they would look in another hue. But what about those invisible colors that lurk at the ends of the spectrum?
...I also had to get to know [the characters] individually in order to ascertain and also to imagine what that particular person would have had to say had he been speaking English.
Olvido has the sense of a state of having been forgotten, for which I am unable to pull out a term in English. The closest would be a manufactured word, forgottenness. ... The problem [with “oblivion”], to my mind, is that oblivion doesn’t carry the personal connotation of people’s having forgotten someone. -- Gregory Rabassa (translator of Gabriel García Márquez and other Spanish- and Portuguese-language texts)
Waley once said to Ivan Morris, I think it was, that the translator, having taken so much away from his original, must add something by way of compensation. The principle is a dubious and dangerous one, and when what is added seems in dubious taste, why then things are dubious twice over. I take much courage from the thought that, though I am translating many things that Waley did not, there is a good possibility of ending up with fewer words than he.
Descriptions and conversations go much more rapidly (save when conversation contains poems or references to them) than do soliloquies and psychological exploration. I do not know whether this is because I feel freer to improvise with the former, or because the vocabulary is so maddeningly limited in the latter. Got to go out and get me a Roget.
The honorifics in the original [chapter] are something to behold. The result is that relatively larger amounts of the original can be encompassed in fewer words of English. If I am right in thinking that rhythm and tempo should be matters of prime concern in a translation, then there is cause here for very considerable concern indeed. I am of course always transferring Genji and his cohorts into a world that moves at a different pace from their own; but here the change is more radical than usual. Should I seek ways to slow down the pace of the translation? If so, what should they be? Blessed if I know. I could be merely wordy—but that would not be right, as the original is not wordy but elaborate and ceremonious.
[At a performance of Shakespeare in Japanese] I found myself saying somewhat grumpily to myself, he is my Shakespeare and not theirs. Rather an inappropriate thought, I know, for a person who is seeking to make their Murasaki Shikibu his.
Another thing Miss Odagiri says is that some of the characters in Mrs. Enchi [Fumiko]’s translation sound like characters in Mrs. Enchi’s novels. I have accused Waley of making some of the characters sound tartly British. That is the sort of thing that happens, I suppose—in the effort to make them seem “natural,” which is to say, to make their speeches seem speakable, one ends up by making them talk like oneself. Probably, despite my sharp words for Waley, I have done the same thing, insofar as I succeed at all in this matter of naturalness.
When I find that I have inadvertently translated the same poem twice and that the two translations seem strangely unrelated to each other, the discovery is cause less for disquiet than for a pleasant, quiet sort of bemusement, that they should be so different. -- Edward Seidensticker, translator of the Tale of Genji among other Japanese classics
To follow in Seiden-sama’s grumpy footsteps a little, my impression is that some amateur translators tend to reinvent the wheel to some extent, at various levels, in particular with regard to how faithful a (literary) translation should or should not be, in terms of everything from articles and m-dashes to metaphors and character names. (I’ve worked, reluctantly, with someone who felt that anything not translated exactly word for word was a dangerously free translation; likewise I gave up on reading the Japanese Harry Potter editions very early on because of their painfully close translation, in some places right down to the punctuation, which meant that there was no attempt to come up with translations that would have been funny or pointed in Japanese rather than just replicating the English terms sound for sound).
I don’t know enough languages well enough to come up with good examples, but for instance a good Japanese translation from the English will not only omit the first person pronoun altogether when it isn’t needed in the target text, but will translate it suitably for what the character would be using in the context (Japanese has a lot of pronouns to choose from compared to English), rather than sticking mechanically to a single one and putting it in everywhere English does. When translating technical manuals from Japanese to English, a lot of translators tend to reflect the Japanese phrasing with “Please...” every third sentence, which I delete ruthlessly when I’m proofreading them: it’s a set of directions for using a tractor or an electric actuator or whatever, not a polite request.
I learned about technical translation at the company I used to work for (they still send me freelance work) and was lucky that a couple of 先輩 there were willing to teach me from scratch, in terms of both technical vocabulary/usage (I am the most humanities person ever, and there are still a lot of terms that I can translate but not actually define) and translation software. For technical work and occasionally other projects, I use CAT software (Trados); it’s not machine translation, but it remembers for you what you’ve already translated and keeps track of glossaries as well, thus saving effort and enhancing consistency. Worse than useless on the whole for literary translation (although I’ve read about someone translating one of those fantasy doorstoppers who used it to keep straight all the random proper nouns, so as to avoid writing about the Crown of Pristine Virtue in one chapter and the Pure Goodness Crown in the next). Technical translation is good for ruthless accuracy and bad for literary translation in the wider sense, from the sentence-by-sentence habits inculcated by Trados to the automatic tendency to represent the source language as faithfully as possible, which can stifle imaginative translation in places where it’s appropriate.
It’s also good for learning to track down the correct term or name or quotation through stubborn online research. I cut my technical-translation teeth on a huge online catalog of everything under the sun, including everyday goods as well as industrial stuff, and I spent HOURS following threads of possibility through Google mazes to figure out the English names of obscure tools or how a bizarre phonetic phrase should be spelled; useful thereafter for finding out how to read obscure names and place names, the actual official text of laws and quotations, you name it.
Non-technical stuff is mostly more fun, I will admit. I’m not a literary translator professionally, but the academic papers and related stuff I work on can be exciting. I went through my work over the last three months and made a list of some of the more interesting and/or representative content: some checking work for a book on left-wing writers in wartime (this one came to me from a grad school friend); technical stuff including measuring instruments for industrial plants, motion control devices, and machine tool parts; papers on teaching traditional poems in high school [this one included several examples of the students’ own haiku, so I amused myself by translating them in proper 5-7-5 format], fathers’ non-standard work schedules, gold-mining villages in Indonesia, company employees who travel the world while working, and the history of Catholic education in Japan; in-house awards for innovation at a major beverage company; an interview with a young woman who farms rice in West Japan; and contemporary documents regarding a Japanese painting exhibition in 19th-century Paris.
okay, I like my job sometimes. Puns and wordplay of all kinds are a huge translator’s headache but also a delight. One I remember thinking well of from a long time back was a line from a Margaret Mahy kids’ book translated into Japanese: the original was something like “she didn’t even read it, she crumpled it up until it was more litter than letter,” which became 手紙より捨て紙, tegami yori sutegami, more scrap-paper than a letter. Then I was just reading a Miura Shion novel in which some high school boys who have come to a well-known tourist spot to draw the scenery notice the large number of couples cuddling in the vicinity. “This gives a whole new meaning to shasei,” one of them says. He’s playing on 写生, drawing from life, and 射精, ejaculating (in the non-dialogue-tag sense), both pronounced the same way. I decided the best translation would be something like “I thought we came here to sketch, but this place looks pretty sketchy.” The Japanese version of Diana Wynne Jones’ The Ogre Downstairs (translated by Harashima Fumiyo) does a neat thing. Among the weird and magical events in that book, there’s a “dragon’s teeth” event in which a magical motorcycle gang springs up full grown (okay, it’s a long story). In the original version, they speak in Classical Greek, or rather in Greek letters spelling out suitable English phrases like “Let me at ‘em!” and “Think you can hit my mate on the head, do you?” It’s a lovely visual/linguistic joke. In the Japanese edition, they speak in pseudo-classical Chinese characters, which is not only a linguistic parallel of sorts but actually a thing in Japanese gang graffiti, at least for something like the well-known 夜露死苦 for よろしく.
I just this week saw in the bookstore a beautiful four-volume set of the Tale of Genji, translated back into modern Japanese from the Waley English translation. Now there’s a thesis waiting to happen. (Also I wonder why they chose Waley and not Seiden-sama or Royall Tyler; just because he remains the best-known in Japan?).
I’m very fond of Zen Cho’s short stories, in which the characters tend to speak Malaysian-English; I can’t imagine how this could be effectively translated into another language (of these, “Prudence and the Dragon” has a Spanish version online and my very limited Spanish suggests that the translator didn’t really manage it, does anyone read Spanish better than me and can opine?). Likewise for regional dialects in Japanese, like my old favorites, Asano Atsuko’s Battery series, mostly in Okayama dialect, or the Hiko Tanaka books in Osaka-ben and so on, where half the sense of the dialogue is in the feel of the dialect; how to put this across without the specifics of the phrasing and its cultural connotations? (Are there Chinese novels, web- or otherwise, which make use of regional dialects, and if so how do they get across things like changed pronunciation?)
My Yuriko thing: a translation project I’ve been working on since I was in grad school if not even before then, letters and diaries by a Japanese woman writer in the 1920s; I tend to try, when translating them, to aim roughly at the tone and phrasing of the transwar diaries I read in English (without the specifically British phraseology, especially since Yuriko learned her English in New York and would, if she had been writing in English, have tended to the American). I haven’t been scrupulous about sticking to idioms and words exactly of the time period, although if I ever get these things into a state for publication, maybe I should. Easier than some to find expression for, because she’s so verbal—she puts what she’s thinking and feeling into words, often a lot of words! which gives the translator more ground to stand on, as it were, rather than having to express extraverbal atmosphere (one reason I do not have any ambition to translate poetry seriously). Exciting and frustrating.
A comment I left on superborb’s post which, although pretty off-the-cuff, I’m kind of pleased with: can we have a three R’s of translation, to wit respect, research, and readability? I feel like that would cover most of the issues with literary translation.
Sorry for this endless blather. Let me know if it brings anything to mind!
no subject
Date: 2022-04-06 12:44 pm (UTC)Extremely specific ramble incoming, because it's very interesting/coincidental in a personally hilarious way that you brought up Zen Cho – I think I've seen her work mentioned before but not checked it out until now, and the way I could literally hear those dialogue lines in my head XD やっぱりManglishだ、間違いないw
As for translating it… I could tell you the varyingly-exact Malaysian Chinese equivalents fairly easily, just by virtue of turning off the mental autocorrect and transcribing what I'd naturally say (having also already formed the immediate and unchangeable opinion that "stalker" would be retained in English but also Absolutely Not pronounced the ~correct~ way).
But given that the cheerfully illegal cross-contamination of syntax is a distinctive feature of said dialogue, the question of whether it'd actually be recognisable as an intended-accurate translation and not simply random-ungrammaticalness for an audience outside the relevant context (defined somewhere between the narrow "maybe one other country in Southeast Asia" to the broader "maybe readers familiar with a similar language set") is hmm. Then again I'm not even sure how the original English reads to most readers to start with? And of course, I can't even begin to think of how I'd render it in any other language.
Also, that 捨て紙 one is brilliant (though it did take a couple secs to switch Brain Language before I got it LOL), and feel free to link my post if you like!
no subject
Date: 2022-04-08 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-09 11:13 am (UTC)Yeah, it's reasonably clear to me from just reading the dialogue (along with a bit of googling because neat) that it's a dialect, not just people being ungrammatical at random, and as you say it's hard to imagine how to render it in any other language. (Also I think Zen Cho is really good at writing Malaysian-English dialogue that both feels natural to an informed reader, ie you, and makes sense to an uninformed one, ie me; the better the writer, the better the translator has to be...)
(Post linked, thank you!)
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Date: 2022-04-06 02:15 pm (UTC)If I am right in thinking that rhythm and tempo should be matters of prime concern in a translation, then there is cause here for very considerable concern indeed.
You’re writing about translating prose here, right? Because that statement instantly made me think about translating poetry, which is a bit different. Because I feel like my favorite translations of poetry take some liberties here but keep… I don’t how to say it well, maybe that they keep the spirit and the sense of the poem perfectly? Or at least as perfectly as it can be done in translating poetry.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-09 11:22 am (UTC)You’re writing about translating prose here, right? Because that statement instantly made me think about translating poetry, which is a bit different.
Yes, that's Seidensticker writing about translating prose, something like...maybe keeping the mood of the original by making sure it reads at the same pace? I'm curious about your favorite translations of poetry. I find poetry really intimidating in a way--kind of the way the words have to create a structure beyond the words themselves? does that make any sense? and doubly so when it's being translated. So your point about "keeping the spirit and the sense of the poem" sounds right to me.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-10 11:59 am (UTC)I liked that part in particular.
I tried translating a German song to English once, and it has a very distinct and fast-sounding rhythm. My English beta removed almost all of it, so now the English translation reads slow, where the original song sounds fast any rhythmic. I wasn't happy with the result. Although I do admit that my initial attempt probably read clumsy, because it was trying to enforce rhythm at the expense of good-sounding English. Ah, dilemma.
I should probably dig up that original attempt again and see what I think about it today. (Must have been a decade ago, surely.)
no subject
Date: 2022-04-11 11:03 am (UTC)ooh, that would be really interesting!
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Date: 2022-04-18 04:28 pm (UTC)The current version is here:
http://tinny.utfs.org/wiseguys/en_summer.html
I fiddled with it again just to get it out of my head, but I don't think I'll update the posted version. It's been too long. ;)
The song is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0YGhpaWspU
(I hope it shows, GEMA is such a pain.)
Ah, it's such a fun song. :D
no subject
Date: 2022-04-20 11:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-13 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-16 07:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-06 05:42 pm (UTC)can we have a three R’s of translation, to wit respect, research, and readability?
This is brilliant! and should be spread far and wide, because yes, it does encapsulate all the main issues perfectly. :D
no subject
Date: 2022-04-06 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-09 11:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-06 08:37 pm (UTC)Your Yuriko translation project sounds like something I'd love to read. Re. period vocabulary, that sounds like the sort of case where a read by someone familiar with the period in the US who could ID what felt like real howlers to them could be useful, for an outside view.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-09 11:26 am (UTC)yeah, I feel that this applies to both writing and translating--even native speakers are not always able to create something that sounds natural if they don't have enough examples of good natural prose (in various styles, I don't necessarily mean, like, "classic literary prose") stuffed into their heads.
Your Yuriko translation project sounds like something I'd love to read. Re. period vocabulary, that sounds like the sort of case where a read by someone familiar with the period in the US who could ID what felt like real howlers to them could be useful, for an outside view.
That is a good point! I have no idea when/if I'll get her together into readable form, but I enjoy working on it, and maybe I'll post snippets every now and then...
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Date: 2022-04-07 03:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-09 11:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-07 03:20 am (UTC)(Also, I am aware this is silly, but I mark any translation not actually set in Spain into Spanish-Spanish down at least five notches. Pick a Latin American Spanish, any Latin American Spanish! They're better.)
no subject
Date: 2022-04-09 11:34 am (UTC)I mark any translation not actually set in Spain into Spanish-Spanish down at least five notches. Pick a Latin American Spanish, any Latin American Spanish! They're better.
Ooh, if you ever want to post about this I would be fascinated to read about it!
(If you're not familiar with it already, you might enjoy the book quoted at the top of the post, Gregory Rabassa's If This Be Treason, which is half an autobiography and half a rundown of the various Spanish and Portuguese translations he worked on (from various countries: he writes "My Spanish is a kind of general American Spanish but when I am doing a book I try to hear the accent of the speaker's country..."). A bit of his time but very funny and fascinating.)
no subject
Date: 2022-04-09 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-08 12:41 am (UTC)Hmm, interesting! I don't think I've often seen rhythm and tempo foregrounded. I'll have to think about that one.
I was also tickled by the mention of Waley - I've recently written a paper on English translations of The Journey to the West, focusing on Anthony C. Yu's full translation, but Waley's abridged one also featured heavily (and was not... super kindly received by Yu XD).
in particular with regard to how faithful a (literary) translation should or should not be
Oh man, oh man, that old can of worms. I keep somewhat up to date with translation studies (for what that's worth...) and was very interested (and somewhat vindicated) to find that these days the prevailing opinion seems to be a) stop arguing about how faithful a translation is because such debates almost always miss the point anyway and b) translation as an active, creative art form in itself; a translation is never going to be 100% faithful, the nature of the thing makes it impossible - so why not then have some fun with it? And yes, of course it always depends on context, sometimes as faithful a translation as you can manage might be called for (see technical translation, for example), but it's really just such a tired argument.
I use CAT software (Trados); it’s not machine translation, but it remembers for you what you’ve already translated and keeps track of glossaries as well, thus saving effort and enhancing consistency
Fascinating! I didn't realise that there's such software (I possibly should have - my sister was a technical translator for years) and it sounds immensely useful for that kind of translation.
in which the characters tend to speak Malaysian-English; I can’t imagine how this could be effectively translated into another language
Oh, this (and dialect) use was a massive topic in the one literary translation course I took once. It's one of those 'there are some strategies but no one has a truly good solution and probably never will' things. Any kind of localisation effort by using dialects of the target language loses, at best, nuance and connotation, but at worst completely misses the point because there just won't ever be a 1-1 option. And yet, taking out the dialectisation also loses something critical. Of the strategies there are, translator's footnotes tends to be my preferred one, but ymmv. Early Terry Pratchett reading has made me used to reading (and liking) footnotes in fiction, so there's less of a barrier than some. Plus, I'm interested in the process of translation itself, which your average reader probably isn't.
Unrelated to translation, but Zen Cho has been on my to read list for approximately forever, so maybe this'll give me a nudge to get moving on that.
can we have a three R’s of translation, to wit respect, research, and readability? I feel like that would cover most of the issues with literary translation.
Very nice and yes, seconded! I've been doing a tiny amount of subbing on viki (life got in the way), English to German, and I very quickly realised that readability in particular is a dimension that translation studies sometimes ignores a little too much. Granted, this does also depend on medium - TV show subs that are only briefly on the screen need to be very accessible to not detract.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-09 11:48 am (UTC)I have a soft spot for Waley because of one of those six-degrees-of-separation things, having once lived next door to his widow, but my impression is that he was the first to translate/discuss many Chinese and Japanese texts and that there are now enough other people conversant in the relevant languages and cultures that he can be criticized as he once couldn't be.
it's really just such a tired argument.
I'm mostly disturbed (at second- or third-hand, so maybe I shouldn't be going on about it) by translators who say "well, this particle is in the Chinese so it should be in the English because it's untranslatable!" or "well, Japanese doesn't have articles, so it's wrong to put an article into this sentence" or the like. I wish people who translate for others in public (as opposed to for fun on their own account) could be held to a certain standard of professionalism (and maybe that makes me a snob and a gatekeeper, but...).
If you do go read the Zen Cho stories, let me know what you think! (Both of the stories themselves and of their translatability or otherwise.) I didn't like her Sorcerer to the Crown series nearly as much as her shorter stuff, because the novels don't have the Malaysian English which I feel like is her great strength...
readability in particular is a dimension that translation studies sometimes ignores a little too much.
Oh yeah, I didn't even think of the more literal meaning of readability with regard to subtitles--whether the viewer can read in the time allowed! Yet another issue, especially as footnotes are harder to slip in...
(Part of the whole difficulty is, does one translate for people like, you know, all of us around here, who find all the language stuff fascinating in itself, or for people who just want to read the damn book or watch the damn show without thinking about the language as language? Both valid in their ways...)
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Date: 2022-04-08 02:21 am (UTC)And feel free to link anything public you want!
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Date: 2022-04-09 11:40 am (UTC)Isn't it? I think they chose Waley of the various English translators because he's still the best known in Japan. There have been translations from the original into modern Japanese that don't go through English, of course; I looked up an article on the book which suggests that the idea is to read it as English-language readers of Waley's edition would have (all the names written in phonetics, lots of phonetically transcribed foreign terms like "curtain" for 御簾, "lute" for 琵琶 and so on... seriously, all kinds of papers could be written on this thing, linguistics, sociology, you name it. (Occidentalizing Orientalism...?)
(Post linked, thank you!)
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Date: 2022-04-10 11:56 am (UTC)This! Omg I identify with this like woah. :D Thank you! And I see that solo hasn't been here, either. I'll send her over.
although I’ve read about someone translating one of those fantasy doorstoppers who used it to keep straight all the random proper nouns, so as to avoid writing about the Crown of Pristine Virtue in one chapter and the Pure Goodness Crown in the next
Eeek. Yeah. If I was working as a professional translator, I would deem such a tool absolutely necessary. As it is, manual checks suffice.
okay, I like my job sometimes.
<3 That did sound like a very varied list of things, definitely not boring! I would appreciate that about a job, too.
“I thought we came here to sketch, but this place looks pretty sketchy.”
Wow, kudos! That's a great one.
(one reason I do not have any ambition to translate poetry seriously)
Eeeeek yes. I am already unsure about *understanding* poetry, let alone translating it. Your ongoing project sounds amazing, though. Continued good luck with it! <3
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Date: 2022-04-11 11:08 am (UTC)Yeah. The translation-aid software is a wonderful tool in the right context, but it can get in the way when used for the wrong kind of text, and there are other ways of checking on terms etc. that work too (I used to work with an Excel genius who could put together lots of macros, is that the word?, that did these things for us).
That did sound like a very varied list of things, definitely not boring! I would appreciate that about a job, too.
Yes! I actually enjoy some of the more boring technical stuff too, it can be like solving a logic puzzle or something, absorbing without requiring higher brain function, but it's really neat to be able to work on papers where I learn something that interests me.
and thanks for various kind comments! <3
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Date: 2022-05-25 12:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-25 01:28 am (UTC)