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: 2022-04-08 02:21 am (UTC)And feel free to link anything public you want!
no subject
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!)