Visibly and Expertly Done: Criticizing Criticism

During one of my many plane trips this summer, I was catching up on reading. In an issue of The New Yorker from July, I noticed that a review of a translated novel (Christian Jungersen's The Exception) described the book as "invisibly and expertly translated from the Danish by Anna Paterson". What exactly did the reviewer, Jeffrey Frank, mean by this? Was the translation expertly done because it was invisible? Would he have criticized the translation if he had felt it was in some way visible? Did he mean that the translation was both invisible and expert? Mr. Frank, I have learned, is fluent in Danish and has recently translated, together with his wife, The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen: A New Translation from the Danish, so obviously he can compare the source and target texts and also is familiar with the work of translators, all of which makes me wonder if he would like his own translations reviewed as "invisible." What does that term mean to him and to other reviewers of translations?

As I have posted before, critiquing a translation means much more than simply reading it as a text written in the target language and seeing whether you can tell that it was translated, and I wish reviewers, especially at such major magazines as The New Yorker, would start to understand that. I would be curious to know why the idea of "invisibility" persists.

How Journalists Work With Interpreters When Reporting

Journalists reporting from foreign countries often have to rely on translators or interpreters when they want to use documents or interview people in the language spoken in the country in question. Many papers (in English and in Swedish, at least – I am not familiar with the newspapers in other languages) just quote from sources as though they spoke in the language of the newspaper; in other words, they don’t name the interpreter or even mention the fact that one was used. For greater transparency, this perhaps ought to be done.

In the New York Times, the Public Editor recently posted to his blog about this topic, and invited staff editor Andrea Kannapell to comment. She wrote, “When there is the luxury of time, and The Times considers the investment worthwhile, we send correspondents for a year of language training before they take up a foreign assignment. We have begun such training for one correspondent who has already spent a good deal of time in Iraq. A year of training, of course, will not make anyone truly fluent, but it does enable the correspondent to get a sense of what people are saying — as well as a sense of whether a translator is up to the job.”

However, that is not always the case, and journalists may still need to rely on interpreters (note: not translators – the people at the Times seem a little confused about the difference between a translator and an interpreter), so one technique they have is to “ask questions more than once, or ask in a slightly different way, if they feel the translator has skipped something or offered a garbled passage.” A comment from translator Daniel Garcia Pallaviccini after this post brings up the issue of what an interpreter is to think if the journalist behaves a little strangely and keeps asking the same questions; the point here is that the journalist ought to attempt to have as good a relationship as possible with the interpreter and perhaps should discuss his or her concerns or methods of working with this person. In the post, Sabrina Tavernise, a correspondent in Iraq, is quoted on her relationship with her interpreter, whom she says has never “purposefully mistranslat[ed].” Of course, clients working with interpreters or translators must always be cautious and aware, but some of these comments do sound a little overly suspicious, as though most interpreters would mistranslate on purpose.

In political situations, finding and using a reliable interpreter is naturally very important, but it is also quite tricky, and it was interesting to read about how one newspaper views the process. I still think that giving information about the interpreter (or translator, in the case of documents) and the methods employed would increase the trustworthiness for editors and readers.

Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this link!

How to Critique a Translation

Not long ago, I linked to an article about translator Robert Fagles. Today’s New York Times includes another article about his most recent translation, of The Aeneid. The article, by Mount Holyoke professor Brad Leithauser, mentions how many people have translated this work over the years, and then goes on to compare Mr. Fagles’ translation to that of Robert Fitzgerald.

Of course, it is always good to see translation highlighted and made more visible, but I do wonder about Mr. Leithauser’s methodology. Although he does mention metrical issues involved in translating Virgil’s work, he basically just compares short quotes from the two translations. He does not, unfortunately, include quotes from the original (which, obviously, would require back-translations). Perhaps he had strict space limitations for his article, but since the quality of a translation is not just about how it sounds in the target language, but also how it relates to the source text, I think a critique of a translation has to include a more in-depth analysis of the original document as well as of the finished product.

After all, what does it mean to critique a translation? It doesn’t mean just reading the end product and deciding if it “flows” well in the target language. A translation has to have some sort of connection to the original text, and it is impossible to judge the success (for lack of a better work) of the translation without referring to the work it is a translation of. And yet, many reviews attempt to do just that. It is likely the case, especially in English-speaking countries, that most critics don’t know the language/s of the book/s they are reviewing, or at least not at the necessary level, but that is a failure of the educational system and ought to be rectified.

In an ideal world, reviewers, like translators, would have a firm grasp of the source language and culture, including general literary history and specifically in terms of the writer in question, as well as of the target language and culture. Otherwise, they are, frankly, not capable of truly critiquing the translation, and are just reviewing the book as though it had been written in the target language.Just as reviewers are supposed to make public any ethical considerations related to their reviews of specific books (for example, if they know the author, or the book was published by the same company that publishes their own work), I think they should also make it clear whether they know the source language and whether they actually have read and analyzed the work in the original.

The next post will look at reading a translation in general.