Translation as Treason

Earlier this year, I read If This Be Treason by translator Gregory Rabassa and wrote a short review of it that is forthcoming in Facköversättaren (the journal of the Swedish Association of Professional Translators).

The first part of the book is about Mr. Rabassa’s life in general, the second looks specifically at the authors and works he has translated, and the third attempts to answer the question that runs through the entire book: Is translation in fact a sort of treason?

Mr. Rabassa considers translation treason in several ways. A translator can not be truly faithful to the source text, since words do not work the same in different languages and do not have the same meanings or create the same images or feelings, so he commits treason against the individual words, and thus the language, and the culture behind the language. Mr. Rabassa writes that a “betrayal of language is many times the betrayal of words and at the same time it is a reflection of the hurdles present in communicating between cultures.”

He also mentions that there are several types of personal treason committed in translation, that against the author, since his words and meanings are not truly preserved, and against the reader, who only reads and receives the translator’s interpretation and re-creation of the original text, and even against the translator himself, since translators “sacrifice our best hunches in favor of some pedestrian norm in fear of betraying the task we were set to do.”

Mr. Rabassa suggests that one could consider all of life a translation and thus a treason, as “life is an idea, a word, in short, a metaphor for conscious existence and hence a translation. We are translating our existence and our circumstance as we go along living and before we are fatally assigned the translator’s lot once the treason has been done.”

If translation is treason, then I think it is a necessary sort of treason. Obviously, no one can read all texts in their original languages. Language often separates writers from their readers, and readers from information or enjoyment. But translators serve writers and readers by bringing them together, by bridging the language divide.

We translators can only do our best to make the treachery as small as possible.

An Interview with Brett

To continue looking at the basic questions of what translation is and who and what a translator is, I’m posting an interview with me that was published in “The Practicing Writer” in 2004. “The Practicing Writer” is a free monthly e-newsletter and website run by Erika Dreifus; it’s full of interesting and helpful information for writers.

The Translator's Practice: An Interview With Brett Jocelyn Epstein by Erika Dreifus

This month “The Practicing Writer” considers an aspect of the craft and business of writing that many of us don't necessarily think about every day: translation. What does a translator do? What are the ties between writing and translation? And where can we learn more? In an interview with Erika Dreifus, Brett Jocelyn Epstein shares insights on these essential elements of the translator's craft and business.

Erika Dreifus: Brett, can you briefly describe the job of a translator?

Brett Jocelyn Epstein: Translation is the art and craft of bringing an author's actual words, as well as his ideas, implications, moods, voice, style, and so forth, from the source language (the language to be translated from) to the target language (the language to be translated to), without being either overly literal and strict with the text or overly free and loose. A translator must consider what and how would the author have written this document if he were writing in the target language. So, translation is the delicate and formidable job of perfectly recreating the author's original document.

ED: What kinds of business opportunities are open to translators?

BJE: The great majority of translators support themselves with non-fiction work. My partner, Daniel Elander, and I mainly translate articles, websites, business documents, and menus from Swedish to English, though we've also worked with Danish. Translating legal documents, articles, reference works, textbooks, websites, and other such items unfortunately pays better and is much easier to get into than translating poetry, plays, or novels. I personally feel that translating creative work is more challenging and more interesting, but since only approximately two percent of all literature published in the United States is in translation (and the translations that do exist come primarily from Spanish, French, or German), it is clear that there is little work available for people who want to translate novels or poems. Most people who do this work don't do so because they want to make money (translating literature is far from lucrative), but rather because they are dedicated to literature and/or to the specific author or work and because they want the intellectual and creative challenge.

ED: In a recent article, you issued a call for more people to “join the ranks of translators.” In what ways may practicing writers be particularly suited to the work of translating texts?

BJE: I really do think that writers are the ideal people to be translators. To translate a text, you must understand it fully and be able to basically rewrite it in a new language. Clearly, then, it helps if a translator has experience with writing, the writing process, analyzing literature, and editing. Certainly there are good translators out there who do not work on their own original writing and likewise there are good writers who don't have the patience for or interest in working with other people's documents, but in general, I believe translating and writing are worthy and compatible mates and I find both that reading, analyzing, and translating texts has benefited my own writing and also that writing stories and articles has helped me better understand the English language and how to translate into it.

ED: What works “on translating” would you recommend for anyone interested in learning more on the topic?

BJE: One of the best ways, I think, to learn about translation is to carefully read and study a document in both its original language and its translation. When I did this with Pär Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf, I spent a lot of time trying to understand what words and phrases really meant and why the translator had made certain choices and I compared this to what I would have done, had I been the translator. In fact, I realized that I was not satisfied at all with the English translation and I hope that one day soon a publishing company will decide to issue a new version of this novel. As for actual works on translation, I have particularly enjoyed and learned from Vladimir Nabokov's essay “The Art of Translation,” William Weaver's essay “The Process of Translation” (which can be found in an interesting volume called The Craft of Translation, edited by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte), and Performing Without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation by Robert Wechsler.

ED: Thank you, Brett!

This interview is from the November 2004 issue of “The Practicing Writer” newsletter. Erika Dreifus is a writer, teacher, and the editor of “The Practicing Writer.” Please see http://www.practicing-writer.com/ for more information.

I hope in the future to include interviews with other translators in this blog; if you have questions you’d like to ask a translator, or if you are a translator and would like to be interviewed, let me know.

Unlocking the Prison of Language

If we know that translation goes far beyond the dictionary, where does that leave the translator?

Here’s a short article I wrote a couple of years ago, called “What Makes a Translator?” The third paragraph looks specifically at what skills and qualities a translator should have.

What Makes a Translator?

The “prison of language is only temporary…someday a merciful guard – the perfect translator – will come along with his keys and let us out,” Wendy Lesser wrote in an article, “The Mysteries of Translation,” in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2002. The following questions remain, however: Who is this translator? What does he do? And what skills should he possess?

Simply put, a translator is a person who recreates a text in another language, attempting to keep a delicate balance between being so literal that the text sounds awkward and unnatural in the new language or being so free that the text has become virtually unrecognizable. A translator has to not only translate the words, but also the concepts. In other words, a translator unlocks the prison of language, as Ms. Lesser said, and helps a text break free of its limited original language, culture, and audience. This service is an unfortunately under-appreciated art and craft.

To do all the above, a translator must have the following things: a native or near-native level of proficiency in both the source language (the language to be translated from) and the target language (the language to be translated to); the ability to thoroughly understand all that a text says and implies; and excellent writing and editing skills. Ideally, the translator would also have a lot of knowledge about both the source and target language cultures, as this affects word usage and meaning, as well as about the author of the original document and his style of writing.

It all sounds rather formidable, certainly, but not impossible. There are, in fact, many excellent practitioners out there who fulfill these hefty requirements, but the tiny number of translated books published in the United States each year reveals the sad fact that few people take up this challenging and stimulating work. If only more people would join the ranks of translators and help unlock the prison of language.

In other words, the skills an ideal translator would possess are:

1. Native or near-native proficiency in the source language.

2. Native proficiency in the target language.

3. Excellent reading comprehension abilities.

4. Excellent writing abilities.

5. Excellent editing abilities.

6. Thorough knowledge of the source language culture.

7. Thorough knowledge of the target language culture.

8. Knowledge of the author.

No wonder not that many people work with unlocking the prison of language!

Of course, not all translators can live up to this ideal, but it is helpful to think about what we should be working towards.

Where the Dictionary Ends

Well, starting a blog about translation leads to two obvious questions: What exactly is translation? And what does a translator do? There are no short answers here and analyzing what translation is and what a translator does or should be is precisely what I plan to look at in the course of this blog.

Basically, translation is the act of recreating a text in a different language. Etymologically speaking, it is the “carrying across” of words from one language to another. This does not mean, however, that to translate is merely to look up each word in a given text (each word, that is, in the so-called “source language”) in the dictionary and then write down its equivalent in another language (the “target language”).

To illustrate how this technique can lead a translator terribly off-course, we can look at something some of my students do. I teach English to adults and a few of them are either resistant to the idea of learning a new language or else they simply feel “too old” or too discouraged to do so. A sneaky way they attempt to get out of actually putting in effort is to use the dictionary trick. If I assign some writing for homework, these resistant students might, instead of writing directly in English, write in their native language and then use the dictionary to translate their sentences word by word into English. It’s always pretty clear when someone has done this because many of the mistakes are obvious. One student, for example, repeatedly wrote the word “sheep” instead of “get” because the same Swedish word (“får”) covers both English words and he just picked the first word he saw in the dictionary and wrote it down without thinking about whether it was correct. He wrote, “I sheep food at a restaurant.”

You might think that someone who claims to be a translator would know better than to do this, but remembering some of the funny or odd mistranslations I’ve seen leads me to believe otherwise. Besides, translation is not just about the meaning of the words. A translator must carefully consider the culture behind the original text and how that influenced the author, and why an author made the choices s/he did, and how all this can be expressed in a new language in a natural way that does not lose or change anything. As Mikhail Ivanov wrote in an article entitled “Bulgakov’s Post Horses,” translation “begins where the dictionary ends.”

This topic will be continued in the next post.

Welcome

Welcome to this new blog! Here I will look at translation, language, literature, and any other related topics.

I’m originally from Chicago and now live in southern Sweden, where I translate from Swedish to English, copy edit, write, and teach English. This means that I work with language in a variety of ways, and this is great for me, since I’ve been fascinated by language for as long as I can remember.

I became interested in translation when I moved to Sweden and started to learn Swedish. In order to improve my language skills, I read children’s books. I was impressed by the quality of Swedish children’s books and began wondering how these books would sound in English and analyzing what made them work in Swedish and how that could transfer to English. Within a couple of years, I had started my own company, A Way With Words, and translation became one part of my business. Right now, I primarily do non-fiction translation (menus, recipes, contracts, instruction manuals, websites, advertisements, articles, tourist information, and so forth), but I would like to transition into working on literary translation as well. As I discovered when I first came to Sweden, there are many great literary works here that deserve an audience in English-speaking countries.

I’m excited about looking at translation in this blog and I welcome reader comments and suggestions.