Foreign Literature in Translation.

[Lu]

Surely some translations can be better-written than the original?

It's possible, but I can't think of an example. And you'd have to wonder if the translation was faithful enough if it was better written than the original.

[Guest realmayo]

If you have a story to translate; and in the story are three elves, who all wear pointy hats, two of which glimmer and one of which sparkles; and the elves have books made of birch leaf paper and bound with rat hide in their hands.

 

If you translate it as a story where the hats neither glimmer nor sparkle, and the books are somehow not made of birch leaf paper and bound with rat hide, then you have written a different story.

 

What happens if you're writing in a language whose users don't have the concept of an 'elf', or pace Umberto Eco the concepts of rat & mouse is interchangeable?

 

I think any translation is a different story because of differences between cultures.

 

If one of your elves had a beautiful wife and also wore a green hat: your Chinese reader is thinking cuckold when your English author is not. Do you change the colour of his hat in the Chinese translation? If you do, you've changed the story. If you don't, you've still changed the story because of the inadvertent introduction of infidelity.

 

 

Eco suggests that translation is a 'negotiation' not just between words but between cultures. Mouse or Rat? refers to the scene in Hamlet when the melancholy prince cries: 'How now! A rat!' and stabs Polonius through the curtains.

 

In Italian, Eco tells us, ratto is not an insult, and topo can stand for mouse or rat. A shriek of 'Come? Un topo?' workably suggests a sense of surprise to an Italian Shakespeare-going audience, though the other connotations of 'rat' in English are absent.

 

But, says Eco, in Camus's La Peste , the dead rat that signals the onset of the plague has to be unambiguously a rat in any translation.

[Guest realmayo]

What you're thinking of is really more of an adaptation. An adaptation is something where the result may be better or may be worse than the original, but it's not bound to follow the original source text as closely, so you can get variances in the actual quality.

 

Fundamentally disagree. If I'm reading something where part of the appeal of the original text is interesting use of language, I know that there will be no one-to-one swap that can consistently preserve that interest from the original language to the new one.

 

So I expect the translator to be imaginative/creative with regards to both the language and the "story" in order to achieve, I don't know, perhaps "equivalence"?

 

If the translator doesn't "adapt" from the original, he's failed.

[Guest realmayo]

Lu (not saying this is a good thing):

 

The discontent lies in Mo Yan’s language. Open any page, and one is treated to a jumble of words that juxtaposes rural vernacular, clichéd socialist rhetoric, and literary affectation. It is broken, profane, appalling, and artificial; it is shockingly banal. The language of Mo Yan is repetitive, predictable, coarse, and mostly devoid of aesthetic value. The English translations of Mo Yan’s novels, especially by the excellent Howard Goldblatt, are in fact superior to the original in their aesthetic unity and sureness. The blurb for The Republic of Wine from Washington Post says: “Goldblatt’s translation renders Mo Yan’s shimmering poetry and brutal realism as work akin to that of Gorky and Solzhenitsyn.” But in fact, only the “brutal realism” is Mo Yan’s; the “shimmering poetry” comes from a brilliant translator’s work.

 

http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2012-fall/selections/anna-sun-656342/

[Lu]

If one of your elves had a beautiful wife and also wore a green hat: your Chinese reader is thinking cuckold when your English author is not. Do you change the colour of his hat in the Chinese translation? If you do, you've changed the story. If you don't, you've still changed the story because of the inadvertent introduction of infidelity.

I like this example. (I would change the colour of the hat unless that is an important plot point. And perhaps even then, if I could manage it without going against the spirit of the story. See here for an example I ran into recently.)

And of course, Howard Goldblatt! I've never actually compared any of his work to the original, but I heard that in addition to translating and polishing, he also edits quite extensively: moving things, leaving things out, etc. I think that some amount of polishing is inevitable, if you translate a bad sentence in the source language to a bad sentence in the target language, the editor/publisher won't stand for it and even if he did, everyone will think it's the translator's fault. But in my opinion it's not the translator's place to edit the work, unless the author agrees.

PS Thanks for linking that essay. I had read it around the time it came out (Mo Yan winning the Nobel Prize brought forth a lot of really good commentary) and was glad to read it again, it's really good.

[Lanchong]

A major problem with most recent Chinese translation of foreign literature is that they are not done by professional writers. The pay is too low to make a living on.

Isn't the true of most translators of Chinese literature into English? Many seem to have day jobs at universities, while translating in their spare time.

[Basil]

Reading Perry Link's articles on Mo Yan and the post 1949 literature makes me think that maybe reading translated novels is as good as it gets...

[gato]

Isn't the true of most translators of Chinese literature into English? Many seem to have day jobs at universities, while translating in their spare time.

Chinese to English, yes, because the market for Chinese literature is tiny in the US. But for literary translators from other languages such as Spanish, French, or Russian, things might be different.

[MPhillips]

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[MPhillips]

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[Basil]

So it seems that based on what we know, literary translators anywhere in the world don't make much money.

 

I think there are tens of thousands of Chinese people out there who have an amazing grasp of English.

 

So, ability wise, there is really no excuse for poor english translation in modern China.

 

Maybe it is that some cultures just care more about non-monetary rewards than others.

 

More fool them. Stupid big noses.

[Lu]

So, ability wise, there is really no excuse for poor english translation in modern China.

Chinese people with good English can almost always find a job that pays a lot better than literary translation. If Chinese publishers start paying decent money to good translators, quality will improve vastly.

Not holding my breath on that. We'll sooner see a Republic of Taiwan.

[Basil]

I've been a bit distracted the last week, sun, swimming pool, etc., but the translated book I am reading, We, I'm about half the way through and the cog has fallen out of the machine.

[Basil]

Finished the book. it was a bit of a struggle, but more because it was read straight after finishing BNW and 1984 than anything else. The first two books are derivative but plainly superior, penned by better story tellers.

 

So probably read about half a million characters on dystopian societies in all in the last couple of months.

 

Time to read a book set in a less distant imaginative world...