Treachery of Translators NYT article (Books, Literature & Reading) Language Learning Forum

Treachery of Translators NYT article
Tags: Press Article \| Literature \| Translation
Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading

iguanamon
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Message 1 of 7

29 January 2013 at 1:45pm | IP Logged

Traduttore, traditore. Saw this in the New york Times today The Treachery of Translators.

NYT wrote:

The law of karma is as unforgiving in the realm of translation as in any other and I was overdue for a taste of my own punishment. I had written a book about surfing in Hawaii called “Walking on Water,” which was eventually translated into Dutch. I had nothing to do with the translation and was simply presented with a fait accompli. My command of Dutch is negligible, but I thought I would test out “Lopen over water” by reference to a metaphor that was, if not my greatest contribution to literature, at least distinctively my own. There was a passage where I was drowning, but not feeling too put out about it, and I had written: “Death was warm and embracing like porridge.” I zeroed in on the sentence, but I couldn’t find anything even closely related to porridge. So I checked with a Dutch-speaking friend – could she tell me how the translator had done it?

“You’d better sit down,” she said.

As we all know here, a lot gets lost in translation and some of it just gets skipped.
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viedums
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29 January 2013 at 3:53pm | IP Logged

More translation news: Finnegan's Wake translation a big hit in China.

Chinese Finnegan's Wake

In fact, this published (and sold-out) version is not the only attempt. Hong Kong designer Felix Yip describes his approach, which involves using Google translate, as well as "mind maps" - scroll down the page to see them!

FInnegans Wake Chinese Ver
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geoffw
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29 January 2013 at 5:22pm | IP Logged

viedums wrote:

More translation news: Finnegan's Wake translation a big hit in China.

Any word on when the English translation is coming out?
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Juаn
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29 January 2013 at 8:23pm | IP Logged

Here is a collection of essays by significant writers and thinkers on the topic of translation. Much of it is illuminating.

My own opinion is that if one has an interest in a culture and its literary and intellectual tradition, there simply is no question but to learn its language.
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mick33
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29 January 2013 at 9:52pm | IP Logged

Interesting article. It definitely explains the pitfalls of translating literary works, and of reading these translations.
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Astrophel
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Message 6 of 7

30 January 2013 at 2:21am | IP Logged

I'm feeling a bit smug now. I consider myself excellent at translation, but my French
is only intermediate, so I couldn't think of an appropriate verb to translate the Marx
pun either. However, my first instinct was to look for an appropriate preposition -
THOSE have plenty of double-meanings. Perhaps a construction with "inside" would work?
I kept reading, to find that's exactly what the professional did.

Languages may not have perfectly analogous constructions, but for any given utterance,
think of how it makes you FEEL, in context, and then construct a sentence in the target
language that produces the same effect. Your sentence should either be as close to a
literal translation as possible, or if that would result in a noticeable difference of
register, using a construction that occurs roughly as commonly in the target language
as the original construction does in the language you're translating from. That way you
get the same effect. Really, I think the only truly untranslatable thing is poetry, and
then only partially so. If you're good, you can find an analogous meter (like how
dactylic hexameter often becomes iambic pentameter in Latin->English translation) and
put all the alliteration and rhymes and other poetic techniques in the right
places...but what you lose is the SPECIFIC word choice, the SPECIFIC phonetic effect,
that all good poetry makes deliberate use of and cannot be perfectly substituted.
Prose, though? It rarely matters whether a specific word you're translating began with
a b or a d, only how it functions within the sentence and the larger context, unlike
with poetry where those incidental things are extremely important.

Something I think needs to be addressed more is how CULTURE translates a lot less well
than language does. A joke that's hilarious in one language might not be funny at all
in another for purely cultural reasons. Ever tried to read something like the Tale of
Genji, which was written in Japan over a thousand years ago? It has to be footnoted all
to hell because otherwise, the things the characters are saying and doing just won't
make any sense - and this has NOTHING to do with the limits of language, but of
culture.
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songlines
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Message 7 of 7

30 January 2013 at 6:25am | IP Logged

iguanamon wrote:

Traduttore, traditore. Saw this in the New york Times today
The Treachery of
Translators.

Amusing. I rather enjoyed Jim Datz' illustration too, with the sticker-style name tag: "Hello, my name is
POISSON".

From the Comments section, Barbara, from NYC, offers a similar anecdote:

Quote:

When I started working on my Ph.D. at Columbia, I had to pass the Latin and French language exams. The French
was a snap, but for the Latin, I got bogged down in a passage by Isadore. It looked so easy--but the subject was
the names of various types of cattle. Yes, I had a medieval Latin-English dictionary, but it wasn't much help.

So my translation read, "Cattle are called 'cattle' because of their distinctive reddish color, whereas cattle are
called 'cattle' for their long horns. Another type of cattle is 'cattle' . . . . " You get the idea. I received a failing
grade.

The next time around, I studied passages from Cicero for four hours a day over three weeks. Ah, Cicero! So clear!
So lucid! So free from animal names!!

I passed and received my degree in 1984.

Edited by songlines on 30 January 2013 at 6:29am

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