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"The Gist": A (re)translated novel | ||
Tags: Translation | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5332 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 4 30 May 2013 at 5:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just ran across a recently-published novelette titled The Gist. It's about a broke translator who's asked to translate a book written in an unknown language. But the author of The Gist decided to try an experiment: he wrote the novelette in English, asked a friend to translate it to French, and then asked a writer he admired to translate it back to English. All three versions are included in the final book.
The story of how the novella was written A description, an except and ordering information
This novelette was published by Subterranean Press, which is a tiny, specialty press that normally prints beautiful limited editions. It's definitely an expensive book for the length of the story. I just ordered one of the last two copies at Amazon.com at a pretty steep discount. I figured that novelette might appeal to some other people on HTLAL. Not only does it tell the story of deciphering an unknown language, but it offers an opportunity to see a professional round-trip translation, and compare each of the different versions. (And while I'm thinking about it, has anybody ever written a true bilingual French/English book—not merely the same text in two languages, but one story which requires two languages to read? I know about the film Bon Cop, Bad Cop, but not any books which involve multiple languages and code switching in the same way.) Edited by emk on 30 May 2013 at 5:56pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6239 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 4 30 May 2013 at 6:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have a copy of a truly bilingual Spanish-English book, which I picked up second-hand in a university town, but don't have it to hand at the moment, and the title escapes me. There are plenty of mid-sentence language changes, and it requires a quite high level in both languages, including a lot of cultural familiarity; I can't fully comprehend it, despite reading Spanish at an often-adequate level.
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| osoymar Tetraglot Pro Member United States Joined 4536 days ago 190 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English*, German, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Spanish, French Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 4 30 May 2013 at 6:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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The U.S. publishing house McSweeney's has a quarterly literary publication that I've
subscribed to for a while, generally of very high quality. They recently dedicated an issue to a similar experiment, wherein very short stories are translated from an L2- >ENG->L3->ENG->L4->ENG. The cover appropriately shows a telephone, a reference to the telephone game (tangent- I know this exists in Japanese as 伝言ゲーム, would be curious about other languages). Unfortunately, the editor shunned the use of translators, people who have dedicated their life to the subtle craft of translation. He instead called upon writers, many of whom have only a basic grasp of the languages they're translating from. What's more, if you read the translator's notes, some of them seem to be under the impression that they weren't allowed to use a dictionary. Maybe it would have been more interesting if the editor had framed it as a hilarious experiment in amateur translation, rather than a philosophical inquiry into the nature of translation itself. Anyway, I hope that "The Gist" is a more interesting experiment. I really like the idea. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4465 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 4 of 4 31 May 2013 at 12:41am | IP Logged | ||
I've never heard of that as the "telephone game" before ... only as Chinese whispers. In Italian I've heard it referred to as il gioco del passaparola. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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