The Art of Translation

June 15, 2024 8:06 AM

See how a translator carries a book from one language to another, line by line. Much like a crossword, a translation isn’t finished until all the answers are present and correct, with each conditioning the others. But when it comes to literature, there is rarely ever just one solution, and my job is to test as many as possible. A word can be a perfect fit until something I try in the next clause introduces a clumsy repetition or infelicitous echo. Meaning, connotation and subtext all matter, but so does style. Below are two attempts to show the thought processes involved in the kind of translation I do. Sophie Hughes for the New York Times.
posted by bq (15 comments total)

This post brought to you by yesterday’s conversation with a friend in which I noted that The 3 Body Problem is translated in an unusual way, such that it is obviously a translation, and we agreed that usually when reading translated works it is impossible to tell the work wasn’t written in English (she learned during the course of this convo that Isabel Allende writes in Spanish).
posted by bq at 8:16 AM on June 15 [1 favorite]

That was great, thanks.
posted by googly at 8:20 AM on June 15 [1 favorite]

Awesome!

If you like this you might also appreciate Hofstadter's _Le Ton beau de Marot_ (one of my favorite books).
posted by Slothrup at 8:32 AM on June 15 [6 favorites]

Seconding Slothrup's recommendation. Le Ton beau de Marot is one of the best meditations on the poetry of language, meaning, and translation that I've ever read.
posted by indexy at 9:12 AM on June 15 [3 favorites]

This is great and I'd love to see more of it.

On the subject of translations that don't work (IMHO, obviously), I read "The Night Watch" by Sergey Lukyanenko, which directly copies over something from Russian that I think is jarring in English. The main character always refers to his boss by first and last name. This is, according to my Russian friends, correct, but it sounds weird to me. I live in the informal West Coast, so I refer to my boss by his first name, but I can absolutely imagine using just the last name or "Mr. Lastname". Using both first and last names makes it sound that I'm his Dad and he screwed up.

A literal translation, but not (again, IMHO), not a very artful one.

Then again, these people exist in a different society. There's nothing wrong with reminding me that these aren't Americans working in an office building in Chicago. Perhaps the using the Russian formalism was a carefully considered choice.

Why does it make sense to me that Raskolnikov lives on Stolyarny Lane in the English translation, and not Stolynarny Pereulok? Or Carpenter Street? I don't know, but it does.

I can see how this would keep a (good) translator up at night.

Alas, I'm not so sanguine about her confidence that AI won't put human translators out of a job. I think people will get used to uninspired translations and, without good ones to compare them to, won't realize how bad they are.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 9:40 AM on June 15

Nobody would say “the truth, the truth, the truth” in English
happy to see this finally worked out: a rose is a rose is a rose
posted by HearHere at 9:44 AM on June 15

Yep, Mr. Speare was definitely again' such repitition.
King Lear: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;"

"No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
and thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
never, never, never, never, never!"
posted by indexy at 1:11 PM on June 15 [2 favorites]

The main character always refers to his boss by first and last name. This is, according to my Russian friends, correct, but it sounds weird to me.

It's Never Lurgi: he's actually calling his boss by his first name and patronym, not his last name. Which is generally correct for formal usage in Russia, and doesn't have a direct parallel in English or American naming customs at all. That distinction, and the fact that there isn't really a way to translate the idea of patronyms, may be why they kept it in the translation.
posted by adrienneleigh at 2:07 PM on June 15 [3 favorites]

Quite excellent. I feel proud… In her description of “Cheers, cheers…” the word “everyone” popped into my head just before my finger shifted on the screen and that word appeared. Translation is so much more than just telling the same story in a different language. It’s not just substituting “book” for “libro.” Machine translation is not.
posted by njohnson23 at 4:16 PM on June 15 [1 favorite]

I think people will get used to uninspired translations and, without good ones to compare them to, won't realize how bad they are.

this is already genuinely a major problem in the field of Japanese–English translation, where you have a whole generation of translators now who in many cases grew up on a media diet entirely devoid of English materials originally written in English for English-speaking audiences, and are thus working from already-iffy assumptions of what is acceptable in English prose and dialogue due to only ever having read stuff that was translated from a very different language, at wildly varying levels of quality
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:51 PM on June 15 [3 favorites]

The audiobook is a foreign country; they say things differently there. 'They' shd really pay ear-book readers a bit more so that they can gloss the long words in a way that doesn't bring the reader up all standing.
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:09 PM on June 15 [3 favorites]

And then those of us who teach English run the gauntlet of both translation and definition… probably a little easier dealing with French and German students ( a recent discussion of Kafka was revealing with my German-speaking students), if only because of the relative familial closeness of the three languages.

I shudder at the thought of having to translate Arabic or Inuit into English and vice versa (three semesters of Arabic was a harsh lesson there).
posted by aldus_manutius at 4:34 AM on June 16 [1 favorite]

Very interesting and well-presented! I enjoy these looks behind the scenes at people doing work.
posted by evilmomlady at 4:40 AM on June 16 [1 favorite]

Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf is a great example of creative translation. It's very fun!
posted by TheCoug at 8:03 AM on June 17 [3 favorites]

Thank you for a joyful read!

The two examples in the article are both dialogs, perhaps not by chance, as I've come to understand that dialogs can be the most tricky part to translate and make or break a translation.

Recently I read a highly unsatisfactory translation of "Cold Comfort Farm" in Chinese -- so much so that I made a project of attempting to fix all the mistakes inside. But among its many shortcomings, the one I couldn't figure out how to fix is its failure to mimic the "rural/country" voice, especially as spoken by old Adam, the ancient farmhand. Of course there are countrified ways of speaking in Chinese, but they give one a too vivid sense of a particular place in China, instead of a place in Essex. (I haven't found any solution for this in other more accomplished translated works either, but haven't quite given up hope.)
posted by of strange foe at 7:37 PM on June 18 [1 favorite]