Out Stealing Translators

Some of you may have heard by now about the novel, Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson, which recently won the Independent Foreign Fiction. The award is special in part because it is quite large (£10,000), but also because the translator, in this case Anne Born, receives half of it.

In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, a long review of the novel mentions the translator exactly zero times (except in the sidebar). If the reviewer has no knowledge of the original language, certainly he or she shouldn’t critique how the translation was done. But to not even state that the book is a translation or which language it was translated from (yes, the review refers to Oslo, but just because a book takes place in a certain location doesn’t mean it was written there) seems to me a gross oversight.

The reviewer, Thomas McGuane, reviews the book quite positively. How does he think that he read the book? In which language? Who and what made the English version that he so admires possible? This is truly a case of an invisible translator, and that a major book section would so blatantly ignore – dare I say “steal” – the important role of translation in making good literature from other countries available in English is depressing.

Educating the Customers, Redux: Time

In the most recent issue of the Translation Journal, I have an article entitled 'Educating the Customers, Redux: Time.' Some of you may recall my previous article on educating customers about the cost of translation.

I’ve posted the latest article below, but there are other interesting articles to read in the Translation Journal, so check it out. And let me know if you have any other ideas on how to educate customers!

Educating the Customers, Redux: Time

Brett Jocelyn Epstein

Some readers may remember my article in the October 2006 issue of the Translation Journal that discussed educating customers about what translation is and how much it costs. Well, it turns out that there’s another matter that we translators need to bring up with our customers: time.

Have you experienced the situation where you received a text from a customer and then were casually, or perhaps sheepishly, informed that it was needed back – perfectly translated and/or edited, of course – within just a few hours or days? And how often has such a text been especially long and/or complicated? And has a customer ever promised to send you a project by a certain date, not met the deadline, sent you the text days or even weeks later, and then nevertheless expected you to be done with your part of it by the date originally agreed upon? And how frequently has such an event occurred during a particularly busy period (annual reports season, for example), when your work has been carefully and tightly scheduled?

It is natural to feel, when something like this happens, that our customers do not respect us or our time, that they have no understanding of what our job entails, and that they do not care if we have to work from eight a.m. until two the next morning several days in a row just to get their assignment done on time. And thinking that a customer does not respect or show consideration for the highly trained professional he or she has entrusted with an important document can cause frustrated and angry feelings and potentially even affect the translator so much that the job is not done as well as it could have been. Sometimes, translators have even been known to warn their colleagues not to accept work from a certain client, since it is “always late.” In other words, it’s a lose-lose situation all the way around.

So why do customers do this? Why do they jeopardize the quality of the work and their relationship with the translator? In my experience, the major reasons are 1) that the customer does not know what is really involved in translation, and thus can not properly schedule the time needed for a thorough translation job, or 2) the customer him- or herself can not schedule his or her own work properly and then passes off the stress and pressure of a looming deadline to the translator, or 3) the customer assumes self-employed workers are simply sitting around, waiting desperately for the next job, and can take anything at any time. A subset of the last cause of this problem is that customers sometimes seem to assume that they are your only customer – or at least your most important one – and that even if they have not sent you the work by the time you agreed on, there is no reason to believe that you might now be busy with someone else’s assignment.

How, then, can we translators tackle this delicate matter of time? To begin with, we can offer the customers more information before they even have hired us. The easiest step is something I recommended in the last article: write detailed information on your website or in your other promotional materials about what translation is and what is involved in your work. If you can, describe past assignments in general terms (because of privacy issues, you do not want to be too specific about what the job was) and mention how long it took you to do every stage of each project. For example, you can write: “5000 word contract. Half of the text was a general description of the companies and their products, and the other half was complicated legal language. I did a good rough draft in six hours of full-time work, and then I spent forty-five minutes researching terms. I revised the translation for three hours, edited it for two, and finally spent another two and a half hours comparing the source and target texts.” Perhaps if many translators began adding to their websites a section about time, along with ones on their professional backgrounds and rates, customers would take notice. Maybe they would learn something, too.

Similarly, when you are first offered an assignment, do not write back with information about your rates only. Those who are not translators have no way of guessing how much time or effort a job could take, which is why it is very helpful if you can be as detailed as possible. Say how many hours you anticipate each step in the translation process taking. Write whether the assignment will require you to go to the library or a bookstore to get specialized information, or collaborate with another translator or other professional. If you can see a rough draft of the document or get any more information about it, look it over and let the customer know if you think there will be any significant problems that will cause you to take a longer time than usual (for example, if the text is poorly written, or if it will be sent to you as a PDF rather than a Word document). And be sure to tell the customer what your schedule is like. Customers do not need to know all about your family obligations or your medical appointments, but it is certainly appropriate to tell them if you know (or expect) that you have a big job coming in, or if you will be on vacation, or if there is anything else that will affect your working time and ability. I usually give my customers specific information, such as, “I will be out of town for the next two weeks, but I will be checking my e-mail. So you can send me the assignment and I will print it out and study it while I am away. But I will not start translating it until this date, so you can expect it on that date. If the assignment has not arrived by this date, then I will not be able to finish it by that date.”

Also, sometimes you need to be stern with a customer. If you have previously had bad experiences with a certain client or if the project in question is coming during a particularly busy season, warn the customer in advance. Say, “I am looking forward to this assignment, but I want you to know that if it does not reach me by the time we agreed upon, I will not be able to do it.” You don’t need to explain to customers what else you have going on and you should not hint to them that you will be nice and make an exception for them and accept jobs that are sent a day or two late; all you need to do is civilly give them this warning, which hopefully will spur them on to get the work to you as planned.

But the advice above only addresses what you can do before you have gotten the text to be translated. What happens if a customer sends you the document after the date you have agreed upon? Or if a customer asks you translate something in an unreasonable amount of time?

To take the second question first, you need to, as stated above, explain exactly what is involved in the work and why you need more time. If the customer still insists – and often this is because he or she was late doing his or her own part in it – you can decide if you do in fact have the time to get it done, even if it means a few extra-long days and nights for you. Naturally, however, you will not work so hard for free, and you will charge a rush fee. Standard rush fees range from an additional 50% to 100% of the cost. Whether a client is willing to pay for the rush work is another question, but that won’t be discussed in-depth here, since the issue of money was addressed in the previous article. I can just briefly remind you that your time is valuable and that you should not suffer, and be paid poorly to boot, when a customer has not planned the project well. You can also ask for a late fee in some situations.

If you see that a document has not come to your e-mail in-box by the date you had expected it, it is appropriate for you to write to the customer and ask what is happening. It may be that the text is finished and ready to be translated, but somehow it just was not sent to you. It could also be that the customer found another translator or the job was postponed and you were not notified. I usually write something like, “I am just checking in with you about the translation assignment. I would appreciate it if you can let me know the status of the project.” It is also appropriate to add a reminder about your time limits or scheduling conflicts, as applicable.

As for what to do when the job has finally arrived, this depends on your relationship to the customer, the size of the assignment, and how late the assignment is. If it is a client who has never been late before and/or someone from whom you earn much of your income, you might want to gently mention the lateness, but not get into a big discussion about it. If the text is short or easy enough that you can still get a translation done, you can let the tardiness go. This time, anyway.

Sometimes, however, you may have to turn down an assignment to get the point across (if it does not cause financial hardship for you to do so, of course). Yes, you may have originally accepted the job, but if the customer has not kept his or her side of the agreement and has not sent you the work as promised, tell the client that. It is enough to politely say, “I am sorry, but I carefully schedule my time and as you did not send me the document as agreed upon, I can no longer accept the job. I hope you find someone else.” In most other circumstances, I recommend finding a colleague when you can not do a certain assignment, but in the case of delay on the customer’s part, it defeats the purpose if you do so. The customer will then just assume that he or she need not be on time, since there’s always another available translator, should the first one be too busy. If you are feeling particularly feisty, you could even mention that you had to turn down other jobs in order to make yourself free for the one that did not appear, and that as a result, you have lost money and potential future clients. Unfortunately, some people just do not consider how their actions affect others, so if you make it very clear to the customer how his or her thoughtlessness and/or inability to stick to a schedule has caused problems for you, this could really have an impact.

Regrettably, I suspect that there will always be customers who procrastinate when it comes to taking care of their own responsibilities, and that there will always be those who do not value the work others do and the time it takes. In the past few weeks alone, for example, a colleague gave me a translation assignment that she could no longer do it because it had arrived late, and I also edited an entire book in just a few (very long) days, because the customer had not planned well for the editing process. But I believe that we can eliminate some of these situations by educating our customers more. Once they begin to truly understand how much time our work takes, which they can only do if we explain the process to them in detail, and once we have begun teaching them that they can not send us documents late and/or expect assignments done very quickly, which we can do by warning our customers and/or refusing jobs and/or asking for rush or late fees, they will start both planning their time and their projects better and treating us with more respect. And isn’t it time that happened?

Which Books to Translate?

A recent article asked experts which books should be translated to English. Some of the suggestions included Israeli author Gabriela Avigur-Rotem’s Adom Atik (Ancient Red), Indian Manzoor Ahtesham’s Dastan-e Lapata (The Tale of the Missing Person), Norwegian Johan Harstad’s Buzz Aldrin, Hvor Ble Det av Deg i Alt Mylderet? (Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?), and Cuban Ena Lucía Portela’s Cien Botellas en una Pared (A Hundred Bottles on the Wall).

If I were asked about Swedish literature, I think I’d recommend some of the children’s books. Swedish children’s literature is really good (it’s not just Pippi Longstocking!), which I discovered when I first moved to Sweden six years ago and learned Swedish in large part by reading children’s books. Some favorite authors include Gunilla Bergström (I adore her Alfons Åberg series), Inger and Lasse Sandberg, and Maria Gripe, but there are many other talented writers whose work I’d like to see in English.

What do you think? Which books from other languages do you believe should be translated to English?

In Memoriam: Poet and Translator Michael Hamburger

Translator and poet Michael Hamburger has passed away. He was born in Germany to a Jewish family who emigrated to the U.K. and he became a translator of works primarily from German. The authors he translated included Paul Celan, Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Hölderlin, Nelly Sachs, Charles Baudelaire, Gunter Grass, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and also Marin Sorescu, whom Mr. Hamburger worked on in a relay translation from Romanian to German to English.

As an obituary describes: the “author of more than 20 volumes of poetry and many volumes of essays, whose seminal study of the tensions in European poetry, The Truth of Poetry (1969), the critic Michael Schmidt has ranked alongside William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis or Donald Davies’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, Hamburger often joked - not without rancour - about British reviewers of his poetry who would “brand” him “better known as a translator”, or a “passionate breeder of rare apples” (which he was), or “a renowned German poet”.”

In an interview, Mr. Hamburger explained how he got into translation and how it related to his work as a translator: “Translation came naturally to me because as a child I was translated from Germany to Britain. So I began to translate when I was still at school, also choosing to specialize in what was called Modern Languages and amounted to French and German. One of my earliest translations was of the prose poems of Baudelaire, and as a soldier in Italy I also taught myself Italian, so as to be able to read Dante. Though I specialized more and more in German, from time to time I continued to translate from other languages.

“Translation, to me, was an activity separate from the writing of my own poems – rather as, for musicians, composition is separate from performance or the interpretation of other people’s music. I don’t ask myself whether my translations are creative. It's enough for me if they serve a useful purpose. Some of them were important enough to me to occupy me almost throughout my long life – like Hölderlin, with successive editions from 1943 to 2005. Towards the end of my life, though, I had to give up translating, so as to be able to concentrate entirely on my own poems.”

Also in the interview, he described how he thought of his work as a translator and that as a poet: “All I can say is that as a translator I have tried to get as close as possible not only to the semantics of the work translated, but to its way of breathing – which, to me, is the most essential characteristic of any poetic text.…All a poet can do is to write the poems he or she is impelled to write – just as nearly all my translations were of work that impelled me for one reason or another, since I was never a professional translator dependent on commissions.”

Impelled to write and impelled to translate, and in both cases searching for the way a work breathes.

A Round-Up of Articles

Ordinarily, when I see an article on language, translation, or literature, I like to write a whole post about it, but in recent days, there’ve been so many interesting pieces that I thought the best thing to do would be to have a round-up of them all in one post.

The first article is from Scientific American and it talks about tonal and nontonal languages and brain development. Scientists have found that people who speak nontonal languages (such as English) have a newer versions of two genes that may affect the cerebral cortex than those who speak tonal languages (such as Chinese).

The second piece is an editorial by Stephen Benjamin, a gay man trained as an Arabic translator, who was forced to leave the U.S. Army because of his sexual orientation. At a time when there is such a need for Arabic (and other) translators, it seems extremely short-sighted (not to mention offensive) for the military to continue to have such a policy.

Next is an e-panel on literary translation, featuring translators Howard Curtis, Katherine Silver, Paul Olchvary, and Richard Jeffrey Newman. They talk about which languages they work with (French, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, and classical Persian), how they began translating, how fast they translate, and other topics. Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this article!

The fourth and final article is from the Times Literary Supplement and it is about the poet Ted Hughes and his work as a translator. He apparently translated from at least fourteen languages, some of which he didn’t actually know. Clive Wilmer, a poet and translator himself, explores connections between various translations by Hughes and Hughes’ own poetry. Mr. Wilmer writes, “In any poem of value there seems to be some poetic element, some inner intensity, which is separable from the language it is embodied in and which therefore appears to defy the truism we began with [i.e. that translation is imperfect and maybe even impossible].” Thank you to novelist Steven Russell-Thomas for sending me this article!

Enjoy these articles!

Nordic Translation Conference

I am planning a Nordic Translation Conference, which will take place in London next March. Some of you who read this blog might be interested in attending or even presenting, or you might have friends or colleagues who would like to know about the conference, so I am posting the first call for papers here.

Nordic Translation Conference

First Call for Papers

The Nordic Translation Conference will take place in London at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies on 7 and 8 March, 2008.

For the first time, a major conference is being planned all about Nordic translation. While many conferences on translation frequently include a presentation or two that mention Nordic issues, however peripherally, there has not yet been an event solely dedicated to the particular challenges and pleasures of translating between and among the Nordic countries, which are often closely related culturally, if not always linguistically. It should be exciting for academics and translators working on and with the Nordic languages to gather, discuss, and exchange ideas. The speakers will include Douglas Robinson, Kirsten Malmkjær, Tiina Nunnally, and Geoffrey Samuelsson-Brown.

The conference will look at literary and non-literary translation of all kinds, including interpreting and subtitling, both between various Nordic languages and also between English and the Nordic languages. Nordic here includes Danish, Faroese, Finnish, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Norwegian, any of the Sámi dialects, and Swedish. Topics can include, but are not limited to, specific linguistic issues involved in translation/interpretation between two or more languages, analysis of particular texts/genres, professional issues, the translator/interpreter’s role, and the effect of cultural similarities/differences among Nordic countries. Both academics and practicing translators are encouraged to attend and present at the conference.

Please send proposals for conference papers (250-400 words) and a brief biographical note by 10 August 2007 to B.J. Epstein by e-mail or to her c/o French Department, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, Wales, or by fax to +44 1792 295978.

Censorship in Iran

Recently, I noticed this article about literature in Iran, especially that in translation. It is interesting to see how much censorship plays a role (presumably native literature is pre-censored). As described in the article, “The ministry checks manuscripts mainly for erotic and religious transgression. Today, if a novel has made it past the censors, most Iranians assume that it has been tampered with and that they are better off searching for the Shah-era edition or the bootleg film version. Even in fiction, all relationships must conform to Islamic law. In the most recent vetted edition of “Madame Bovary,” for example, Emma’s adultery is omitted. Characters in Western novels who drink Champagne or whiskey find themselves uniformly sipping doogh, an Iranian yogurt soda that has never made anyone tipsy.”

Personally, I think one of the great joys of reading literature is learning about other cultures and lifestyles. For example, I’d find it odd if the characters in a book that takes place in Iran were drinking Guinness or enjoying a Japanese tea ceremony, and not doogh. When books are censored and adapted in this way, it seems as though only the plot (or some portion of it) matters, and not the culture behind it, and that is a loss. Apparently, many Iranians are aware of this and that’s why they turn to bootleg movies instead.

In Iran, rather than deal with these issues, “some [publishers] have turned away from contemporary literature altogether. The Western fascination with Rumi, for example, has heightened the already enthusiastic interest in Iran, and publishers are putting out new criticism and fresh translations. “The Persian classics create fewer problems,” Mohammad-Reza Zolfaghari, an editor at the Chaveh publishing house, said.”

It’s obviously, and unfortunately, much easier to control new translations of appropriate classics than attempt to translate foreign texts (or movies) that might be challenging to the country’s (or the government’s) belief system.

In Memoriam: Physicist, Author, and Translator Hans-Uno Bengtsson

I was saddened by the news of true Renaissance man Hans-Uno Bengtsson’s recent, untimely death. Dr. Bengtsson was a Swedish physicist, the author of many books, and a translator from English to Swedish and from Danish to Swedish. He also liked to fly planes, ride motorcycles, and lecture all over the country on a variety of topics, and he was active in many organizations, including one focused on the author Fritiof Nilsson Piraten. He was a member of the Långaryd family, which is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as being the world’s largest charted family, with at least 149,000 members.

Many people spoke about the enthusiasm and care Dr. Bengtsson brought to his teaching. I was lucky enough to hear him lecture several times when I lived in Sweden, and he was always entertaining and energetic, and able to make any topic fascinating and easy to understand. I watched him walk on hot coals and I also watched him lie on a bed of nails while an assistant placed bricks on him and then hit the bricks with a hammer! Dr. Bengtsson did all this in order to explain physics in a way accessible to everyone. He certainly caught people’s attention!

I also had an interesting personal experience with him. One day, I’d been teaching in Lund, in southern Sweden, the same city where Dr. Bengtsson was a professor at the university. We both got on the train in Lund and he sat a few seats away from me. At the next stop, in Landskrona, right before the doors closed again, I saw that he suddenly rushed off the train, as though he had forgotten he was supposed to get off there. Unfortunately, he left his backpack behind. He owned a very unusually shaped backpack and it was, I’d say, as much a signature for him as his all-black clothing, including his leather pants and his Dr. Martens boots. So I was sure it was his bag and that he’d accidentally left it on the train in his confusion.

The next stop was Helsingborg, where I lived. I waited a few moments to see if anyone else would claim the bag, but finally I took it, ignoring the curious looks I got (after all, I already had my own backpack, and it did seem odd that I went over to another seat and took a second bag that clearly was not mine; no one said anything, however). So I took his bag home with me and I got my partner – who had had Dr. Bengtsson as a professor in several physics courses – to send him an e-mail, explaining what had happened.

The next day, my partner received a relieved reply. Apparently the professor had many important papers and other items in his bag and thus it meant a lot to him not to have lost it all. A couple of days later, Dr. Bengtsson was in Helsingborg and I went to the train station to meet him. I gave him his backpack and was very surprised when he expressed his gratitude and then handed me two bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne and a big box of chocolates. All I’d done was return his bag – I certainly didn’t expect such generosity. But he was known for his interest in good food and wine, and it makes sense that he’d want to share that with others whenever he could.

A Swedish database lists Dr. Bengtsson as the writer or translator of over one hundred texts. He was the author of physics textbooks as well as of many popular books, including ones on the physics of cooking, physics and alcoholic spirits, physics and flying, Sherlock Holmes, a couple of books about physics for children (based, apparently, on his own two children), and much more. He also translated both popular scientific books and fiction, including works by Murray Gell-Mann, Lee Smolin, Brian Green, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Fry, Robert van Gulik, Jill Paton Walsh, and others. An article I read about him mentioned how he enjoyed the challenge of finding just the right Swedish costume for each book.

Hans-Uno Bengtsson was an extremely productive and curious person, and his example is an inspiration.

Subtitling

Subtitling is a topic that has not been mentioned on this blog, though it is of course a kind of translation. So I was interested by an article on subtitling movies.

In this article, the director Timur Bekmambetov is quoted as saying, “We thought of the subtitles as another character in the film, another way to tell the story.” This is certainly a different view of subtitling than the usual idea that it is a somewhat unfortunate, distracting necessity. Subtitles were often expected to be as unobtrusive as possible, whereas this director wants to highlight them, and make them a real part of the movie, and he does that by using colors and effects.

The article goes on to explain: “The subtitles that will allow non-native viewers to follow the stories are crucial because no matter how flashy or impressive a movie may be, it’s the subtitles that can stifle or showcase its quality. Although many audiences around the world, most of whom see foreign films dubbed, consider them the cinematic equivalent of Brussels sprouts, subtitles remain an unsung yet essential tool of moviegoing. And with technology improvements, more people speaking foreign languages and the modern habit of multi-tasking, the traditional aversion to watching a film while reading it just might be on the wane.”

One small quibble I had with the piece was the idea that while “literature [which] has the safety net of footnotes, film subtitlers have to make it work in the moment, all while trying to adapt wordplay and cultural references.” I think many translators of literature would be surprised to hear this, since they obviously also attempt to wordplay and cultural references and make the story or poem work as it is, without resorting to footnotes. It’s true that translators can use footnotes or endnotes if necessary, but many would prefer to avoid it, so as not to take attention away from the piece.

It was interesting to learn how much time (1.5 seconds per subtitle) and space (45 characters per line max) there is for subtitles and also to be reminded that there “are logical rules as well, such as finishing a subtitle when a character stops speaking and not extending it over a cut, which can be disorienting. Good subtitles work with the rhythm of the scene, based on accurate spotting that captures that timing.”

Translation and Journalism

When reading newspaper articles about the recent elections in France, I kept noticing something interesting. Interviews with French citizens always quoted them in English. But I doubt these people all spoke English, so what I wonder is: why was there no mention of the fact that the interviews were (presumably) conducted in French and translated to English? The same is true of nearly all articles that cover “foreign” events. Doesn’t this influence the reader’s understanding? Shouldn’t readers know which parts of an article were translated and what strategies and goals were used in the translation?

The NY Times had a short piece from the Public Editor about this awhile back, focusing on the use of interpreters in reporting from other countries, but I don’t think this is a matter that most readers think much about. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a second byline, or even a sentence at the end of the piece, saying who performed the interviews and in which language or who translated the texts that were mentioned and how the translator went about it? Not only would that increase the translator’s visibility, but it would also remind readers that not everyone speaks English and that it is worth thinking about how the people or documents – the items that make up the news, that is – quoted in the article were shaped by the culture and language that they come from.

The Violence of Translation: Conquering and Colonizing a Text

To continue with the metaphor theme, I was intrigued by the book Translation and Empire by Douglas Robinson, which discusses postcolonial theories of translation. One chapter quotes from Jerome, Dryden, and other major figures from translation studies, and it is interesting to see their comparison of translators to conquerors or pillagers, who take what they want from a text and then make it over as they see fit in the target language. The text is thus rather violently colonized. In some instances, it seems that (male) translators view languages as female; it is, therefore, acceptable to “rape and pillage” a foreign tongue – to take what the translator thinks most important or useful – in order to protect the native language.

Translation as a Log Cabin

Readers of this blog know that I like metaphors for translation. So I was happy when, while reading The Translator as Writer, an interesting book I will surely mention again soon, I noticed an essay called “Metaphors for the Translator” by translator Michael Hanne. In this piece, he reviews some of the many metaphors people have suggested for translators and the translation process and analyzes them. Here is one example:

“She [translator Margaret Sayers Peden] suggested that the best translators of literary texts act like curators transporting an old timber structure such as a log cabin to another location: ‘Carefully we mark the logs by number, dismantle them, and reconstruct them in new territory, artfully restoring the logs to their original relationships and binding them together with a minimal application of mortar’. She insists that the translator must avoid the temptation to ‘slather on the plaster’ beyond the point which is essential (Peden 1989: 14). Translation involves a demolition job followed by a reconstruction. This is an attractively ingenious image, which, on further consideration, turns out to be fundamentally mistaken. The problem is that, when you come to ‘reconstruct’ the text in new territory, you have to undertake the task, not with original logs, but with timber (language) that is indigenous to the target culture, has a different grain, a different colour, and is supplied in different lengths. Moreover, as literary scholars from Mikhail Bakhtin to Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes remind us, all language is second-hand, which means that every literary text is made of fragments of earlier utterances. So, when we translate, the lengths of timber with which we reconstruct the log cabin are not only of a different species, but they have also been recycled and bear the marks of the previous uses to which they have been subjected in that territory/culture.” (212)

Embargo on Translation

Here is an article about Circumference, a journal that publishes poetry from other countries in English translation. Jennifer Kronovet, one of the founders and editors of the journal, describes the decision to publish poems from certain countries, despite a U.S. trade embargo that bizarrely and misguidedly forbade it.

Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this article!

A Polychromatic World, or Against Ethnocide

Those who know me are well aware that anthropology is one of my big interests. My choice of a career in translation makes sense in the context of this deep enthusiasm for cultures and languages; translation can be considered a form of anthropology. As I’ve said before, translation does not simply involve finding an equivalent word in the target language for a word in the source language; rather, it is about conveying the whole culture that has helped shape each word, each phrase, each concept in a text. That’s why it isn’t enough to study a bilingual dictionary or a list of vocabulary in order to consider oneself fluent in a tongue; a deep understanding of the culture and the people is necessary.

Wade Davis is an anthropologist and National Geographic’s Explorer-in-Residence (an oxymoronic title, as he points out!). Someone sent me this link to a speech Dr. Davis gave a few years ago. In it, he mentions that there are currently 6000 languages on our planet, but only 3000 are still used regularly and taught to children. Dr. Davis claims that every 2 weeks, an elder who is the last speaker of his or her language dies and with that elder, the language is gone. And when a language is lost, so are the beliefs, feelings, and culture behind that language. In an interview, Dr. Davis points out that “now languages, like cultures, like species, are being lost so quickly that they don’t have time to leave descendents.”

Dr. Davis says in his speech that genocide is condemned while ethnocide (which includes the loss of cultures and languages) is not; instead, it is “celebrated as part of a development strategy”. But a “polychromatic world of diversity” is to be preferred. Anthropologists, he said, believe that “story-telling can change the world” and that “this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural, pluralistic world, where all the wisdom of all the peoples can contribute to our collective well-being.” Certainly, we translators (who are, after all, people devoted to intercultural communication and understanding, and people who help others have a voice) believe this as well.

Just for Fun – Machine Translations or Novel Excerpts?

Can you tell the difference between machine translations from German and sentences from novels by William Faulkner? It is hard to know if this silly page is a harsher criticism of Faulkner or of machine translation!

Team Translation

This weekend, I was reading Translation and Power, edited by Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler. In an interesting essay by Lin Kenan on translation’s role in China, there was a section on the history of translation in the country. Translation in China began two thousand years ago with Buddhist religious texts; such translation was done in teams and it included what perhaps can be considered a form of sight translation, the subject of the last post.

Dr. Kenan writes: “First, a foreign monk recited from the scriptures. As he was doing so, a native speaker of the target language translated orally what was heard into Chinese. Then someone else transcribed it into written script before it was polished and finalized by a stylist.”

This is quite a different method of operation than most translators follow these days, at least in Europe and the United States. It is true that many religious documents are translated in teams or at least the translation projects are run by editorial boards, but otherwise, team translation is not common, and interpretation/sight translation (I assume that the interpreters in China had access to the scriptures being recited from) usually is not part of the process. One wonders if the translations suffered or were improved because of the multitude of people working on them. Having several people to share ideas with and/or to look over a translation is generally beneficial for translators and their work, but there is also the question of style, since all people have different vocabularies and different ways of writing, so it might be difficult to make a text consistent if each of the translators on a team has his or her own translation techniques and his or her own sense of the text and its style.

Dr. Kenan mentions that team translation is still practiced regularly in China; a recent example he gives is James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Sight Translation

The previous post described a translator training program I learned about during a lecture at Swansea University. There was also another interesting lecture at my school last week. Professor Gloria Sampaio from the Catholic University of São Paulo in Brazil spoke about sight translation.

Sight translation is something I had never thought much about and it is not one of the more researched areas of translation studies, so I appreciated her talk. Basically, sight translation is doing a translation on the spot orally from a written text. Sometimes a translator or interpreter might have a couple of minutes to prepare, but often she or he simply gets a text and has to read and translate it aloud at once. In other words, it is oral translation, a combination of translation and interpretation, of the visual and the vocal. Professor Sampaio said that it should sound as though the translator is just reading aloud something in the target language.

Historically, she explained, it was used a pedagogical tool for teaching classic languages. Some language courses still do use this technique. Now, it can frequently be part of an interpretation assignment, such as during a court case when there are documents being discussed, or if an interpreter is doing a simultaneous conference interpretation and someone is reading aloud from an essay (so the interpreter has the paper and also has to listen in case the speaker deviates from the text in some way). In other situations, an interpreter or translator might be handed a text and asked to summarize or analyze it, rather than perform a straight translation.

Professor Sampaio made it clear that sight translation is a challenging activity, since it requires so many different skills at once (reading comprehension, analysis, terminology, quick-thinking, memory, speech production, and so on), and that it could be a useful part of interpreter training programs. She also thought it was a good way of testing and assessing translation/interpretation/language students or applicants for language-related jobs.

A University Translation Bureau: Training Translators

The last post mentioned a way of training translators in the United States. Last week, Marcel Thelen from the Department of Translation and Interpreting of the Maastricht School of International Communication of Zuyd University in Maastricht, in the Netherlands, spoke here at Swansea University about an interesting program he has set up.

As a way of training his undergraduate translation students, Dr. Thelen has started a translation bureau at the university. He explained that it is mostly for the fourth-year students, the ones who will soon graduate and hopefully get jobs as translators, but some of the younger students are involved too. When he first started the bureau, it was all simulated role-play, with the result being that it felt fake and there was no incentive for taking it seriously, since all students had to do to get credit was participate. So, he changed it to a real bureau.

Students have to write CVs and cover letters in order to apply for positions (office manager, project manager, IT expert, translators, editors) and then they go on interviews. Those who want to work as managers interview with Dr. Thelen and then they interview and hire the translators and editors. Unfortunately, the students have to stick with whatever position they’ve chosen for the whole term, so they don’t get a chance to switch, which would be even better, because then they would get experience with a range of translation-related jobs. Not all those who train as translators then work as translators; for example, they can go on to be project managers at translation agencies or become localizers. So that is why getting the chance to train or intern in a variety of roles could be interesting.

The bureau gets job assignments from professors on their university campus or from other schools with similar programs (they are each other’s clients, in a way). They also get samples of already-completed work from agencies, which means that they then can compare their own translations to the professional ones, and such analysis is a useful exercise for them. Finally, they also do free work for the non-profit sector. The jobs they do are not just translations, but also include terminology or scanning or other such assignments.

A manager receives the assignment and gives it to a translator. An editor goes over it when the translator has completed it. The bureau receives fake payment for the job, but on a sliding scale, depending on whether the client is satisfied. The students involved in each assignment get class credit based on the satisfaction and payment, as well as on their attendance and their reports on their work. If a student is not doing a good job with the assignments, she or he can get warnings or extra work, and can even be dismissed, if the circumstances call for it.

Dr. Thelen explained that his students get a lot of useful practice out of this bureau. As already mentioned, they learn how to write CVs and application letters and how to interview, and they also learn how to work at a translation agency, and, of course, how to handle the specific requirements of whichever job they get at the agency. Many of the students improve their translating and editing skills, end up working more efficiently, practice using CAT tools, and also get experience with problem-solving, bureau management, workflow management, personnel issues, negotiation, dealing with clients, meeting deadlines, handling financial issues and balancing books, and so on.

I think Dr. Thelen’s program sounds like a good one. It would be interesting to know if alumni from such programs are hired at bureaus more frequently and/or if they are more successful in their translation careers. I’d like to see more university programs in translation include such real-life (or, at least, simulated real-life) practice along with what they already offer, i.e. translation theory, training in using computer programs, and language courses. Perhaps it makes sense to also have a sort of mentoring system in which students intern with and/or have study visits at bureaus and/or with freelance translators and/or at other places that employ translators.

Students training to be translators and/or to work with translation in some other way need this hands-on, pragmatic experience and not just the more academic courses.

Three Lacks and a Partial Solution

In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, three distinct lacks are highlighted: the lack of trained translators and interpreters in the United States, the lack of translation and interpretation programs there, and the lack of funding for such programs.

An interesting partial solution to these problems is that the National Virtual Translation Center sends “unclassified government documents to translation professors at several universities to give to their students as course work”. That means that students get more translation practice and the government gets its documents translated. It seems to work well as an additional way of training new translators, even though more funding is needed.

The United States is pretty far behind Europe in terms of the number and content of translation training programs (not to mention translation studies programs, which are not the same thing). The little interest shown there for languages has already been discussed on this blog, but clearly this is a problematic situation.

The next post will be about another way of training translators, this one a program in the Netherlands.

Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this article!

Fairness in Payment Practices

I recently came across this website, which compares English texts with their translations. It claims to give information on how 100 English words translate to other languages. I can’t attest to the truthfulness of most of the figures here, but as for the Swedish amount given (103), I have to disagree. Generally, an English text becomes shorter, in terms of word counts, in Swedish, because Swedish allows for longer words (created by putting two or more words together into one).

Despite the possible inconclusiveness of the numbers on this site, it relates to an interesting and important issue. Since translators get paid by the source word, should the pay be different depending on which direction a translator works in? How does, or should, this asymmetry in word count affect translators’ fees?

For example, if a Swedish to English translator gets 12 cents per source word, should an English to Swedish translator get a lower amount per word (since s/he will have more source words)? Or should the English to Swedish translator get paid per target word instead? Or is the system fair as it is?

Revise inglish spelling by Guest Blogger Theo Halladay

Recently, I began a correspondence with Theo Halladay about English spelling. Ms. Halladay graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1948 and is a “retired Montessori scool teecher, artist, art teecher, composer of 30+ songs & coral anthems” with “riting credits in 23 publications.” You will notice from that description that Ms. Halladay uses simplified spelling. That’s why I asked her to be a guest blogger and to tell us about spelling reform. I hope readers will respond to her post about reforming English spelling!

Revise inglish spelling by Theo Halladay:

Brett has askd me to rite sumthing about the movement to update & reggularize inglish spelling. I am activ in the Simplified Spelling Society, based in London, England & founded in 1908. We ar a group of educators & uthers in inglish-speeking cuntrys all over the world, who ar concernd about the massiv illiteracy problem – between 20 & 40 million functional illiterats in the US alone. We note that uther european cuntrys hav updated their spelling sistems so words ar speld the way they sound. English has never dun this, with the result that italian children, for example, lern in 2 yeers wot menny anglo children fale to master in 12, namely how to spel their own language corectly. Unemployment, crime & the high cost of scooling ar the results.

Eleetists & stubborn “inglish traditionalists” jellusly gard a mishmash of uneddited spellings from 4 difrent language roots - words wich must all be individdualy memmorized, since spelling patterns ar not at all consistent. e.g. do we realy need 11 difrent ways of spelling the sound ee?

We solicit ideas from people like yurselvs as to wot & how menny changed spellings would be tollerated the best, not only by angloes but also by foreners. Chek out our magnificent archives on the history of spelling reform, & join us as we argue the subject & plan for our CENTENNIAL convention in England next yeer!

The London Book Fair and the Case of the Missing Rights

Yesterday, as I was reading this article about the London Book Fair, learning how the agents and editors “schmooze,” as the article puts it, and make deals at this fair (which doesn’t seem to include many actual writers, not to even mention translators), I came across the following sentence: “They do so [that is, schmooze and make deals] every fall at the Frankfurt Book Fair, but increasingly London is their gathering place in the spring, above all for the lucrative part of the publishing industry that involves selling foreign rights for English-language books.”

“Foreign rights for English-language books.”

So what happened to the English rights for foreign-language books? Does anyone else find it sad (but, unfortunately, not surprising) that a major international book fair is focused on spreading English-language material rather than (or in addition to) on making it possible for publishers to expose English-speaking audiences to all the great books in other languages? I’ve said before, I find it lamentable, and worth working to change.

More on Translating Harry Potter and Other Children’s Literature

Awhile back, I posted a link to an article on translating the Harry Potter books. Here is another article (in two parts) and it goes into some specific issues more in-depth. I still haven’t read the books in question, but I nevertheless find that this article gives me a lot to think about.

Thank you to Gili Bar-Hillel for sending these links to me. Ms. Bar-Hillel is the Hebrew translator of the Harry Potter books and other works and I met her at the conference recently described. She is mentioned in this article: “Gili Bar-Hillel, the Hebrew translator, agrees that the pressure is intense but in her case believes that this actually contributes to the quality of her translations, for two reasons: first, she must by necessity be single-mindedly focused on the task, and second, everyone around her—including her family—is geared to helping her work as fast and as effectively as possible.” Lucky Gili to have such a supportive family and to be able to work so well under pressure!

Here are a few comments on part one of this article:

“…translations of the first four volumes into Russian had been widely criticized for inaccuracies, a lack of fantasy, and inserted moralizing…” – I find it interesting that children’s books (okay, adults read Harry Potter, too, but they are still children’s books) have added moralizing. This has been a common issue in the translation of children’s literature (which happens to be my primary research field), but I would have liked to believe that translation these days had moved beyond this idea of adults thinking that they know best what children ought to read, and what they ought to get out of their reading. Would this happen in a work of fiction for adults? In my experience, generally not. I wonder if this has occurred in any other translations of these books.

As for cultural issues: “Translators have several options, including de-Anglicizing the text, leaving names and concepts as they are (but including explanations of particularly difficult notions, such as Christmas crackers, Halloween, and Cornflakes—the latter having earned a footnote in the Chinese translation, to indicate that these are consumed immersed in milk for breakfast), or some combination of the two.” I’d be curious to know if any readers of the Harry Potter books in other languages have noticed any particular strategies for cultural topics. Some people think that domestication (the term for when a translator removes the foreign elements from a text and adapts the work to his or her own culture) might be more common in texts for children, because of the idea that children will find “exotic” items, such as kinds of cereal or holidays, confusing. My personal view, however, is that exposing people – whether children or adults – to new things is generally beneficial.

A somewhat related topic is UK versus US English. J.K. Rowling’s comments here are interesting (though I am not sure why American children would be confused by the idea of a philosopher – does that say something about the US educational system?): “Along with her American editor, J.K. Rowling decided that beyond Americanizing the spelling (flavour/flavor, recognise/recognize, etc.), words should be altered only where it was felt they would be incomprehensible, even in context, to an American reader. “I have had some criticism from other British writers about allowing any changes at all, but I feel the natural extension of that argument is to go and tell French and Danish children that we will not be translating Harry Potter, so they’d better go and learn English,” Rowling says. Thus dustbin becomes trashcan and a packet of crisps is turned into a bag of chips. Dumbledore is barking in Britain but off his rocker across the Atlantic. Most importantly, at the suggestion of the American editor, the title of the first book was altered from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, both to avoid what might be thought of as a reference to misleading subject matter, and to reflect Harry’s magical powers. The choice of Sorcerer’s Stone was Rowling’s idea.”

As for part two of the article:

I found this comment somewhat odd: “Contact with J.K. Rowling is not an option, as the author has generally not made herself accessible to the translators, nor has her agent been especially forthcoming on problematic areas of the translations.” – One would think an author would want to be helpful, in order to help make the translations of his or her work as good as possible. Some may expect the work to speak for itself, but the fact is that translators may still have questions, and thus contact with the author would be a great book.

And, finally, let’s end on a slightly depressing note: “Torstein Hoverstad, the Norwegian translator of Harry Potter, is among the many who have described the experience of being a literary translator as that of attempting something inherently impossible, being badly paid, and remaining virtually invisible—and that’s if you’re successful.”

Translation Issue of Poetry Magazine

Poetry magazine’s April issue is all translation. A few of their poems are online (including one by one of my favorite poets, Pablo Neruda) and what I especially liked about the issue is that the translators (including Paul Muldoon and Robert Pinsky) have written notes to go along with the poems.

Charles Simic jokes in his note that hell is full of translators of poems, but one of the things that I found interesting here is the variety of ways the translators view their work – some took liberties (Michael Hofmann added what he termed an “opportunistic refinement,” a reference to Fox News in Gunter Eich’s poem, which I found jarring, and A.E. Stallings felt more liberty because she made the translation for someone who knew Alcman’s original poem in Ancient Greek), while others, such as Mr. Simic, seemed anxious to not make any changes or additions at all (he frets over having broken one of Novica Tadic’s lines into two), though most are somewhere in the middle.

In their notes, the translators discuss word choices, the sounds of the poems (such as the sensuousness of Coral Bracho’s Spanish), the formal qualities of the work (Robin Robertson says that Pablo Neruda’s ode to tuna is shaped like Chile, and Peter Cole describes Yitzhaq Alahdab’s “four monorhymed distichs in the Hebrew deployed in a quantitative meter”), and how their languages compare to English (Shawkat M. Toorawa, the translator of Adonis’ poem, mentions that Arabic has no capital letters, which means that it differentiates between God and god by using different words, while J.M. Coetzee feels that Afrikaans and English are both Germanic and thus there are no structural difficulties). Also described are their roles as translators (Kathleen Jamie minimizes her efforts, since she says all Gaelic writers know English and could easily translate their own work), how they work (Mr. Robertson apparently referred to a previous translation of the same poem, and others worked with the poet and/or with a rough English draft provided by the poet), and even why they translate (Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough writes in the note to her translation from the Polish of Janusz Szuber’s poem that “Reading a poem and loving it aren’t enough for translators; they have to translate it, since translation brings them closest to owning the object they love. But the translator’s love has nothing selfish about it: he or she desires to possess the object of that love only to share it with others.”)

It’s also nice to see a variety of languages included, even some less common ones, such as Korean, Belarusian, Gaelic, Swahili, and Hungarian. I, of course, would have liked to see one of the Scandinavian languages represented, however.

Perhaps more literary magazines will begin to focus on translated works as well now; if so, publishing the original text alongside the translation and commentary from the translator seems like the ideal situation. Reading the translators’ notes on the poems added to my understanding and enjoyment of the work.

Thanks to Erika Dreifus for telling me about this issue of Poetry and also to the kind person who sent me the issue!

A Year of the Blog

Today is the blog’s first anniversary, so I want to thank you for reading, and also for all the responses I’ve gotten, some on the blog itself, but mostly by e-mail. It’s great to see how many people are interested in translation!

More on the Conference

In the last post, I wrote about what I presented on at the Child and the Book conference in Istanbul. Now I’d like to tell a little more about the conference in general.

The keynote presentation was by Professor Zohar Shavit from Israel. She spoke about the development of children’s literature and children’s culture. Initially, children were viewed simply as small adults with special needs, and gradually childhood became a concept of its own, and children were recognized as distinct from adults in many respects. However, Professor Shavit pointed out that among the upper classes, both children and the lower classes (often service people) were viewed as dependent, and in need of help. This connection between children’s culture and people and things that were service-related or on the (espeically lower) periphery of adult culture is primarily what she discussed. Examples include the trend for sailor outfits for children and rocking horses as toys. One positive aspect of all this, she thought, is that the ambivalent status of children’s literature allows it to discuss issues that are not considered appropriate in literature for adults.

The guest author at the conference was Swedish writer Åsa Lind, whose work has been translated to many languages, but unfortunately not English. She told many entertaining stories about her background and career and how she writes, but also mentioned the literary hierarchy and how children’s authors are often lowest. Little importance is attached to children’s literature, for a variety of reasons. But on the contrary, Ms. Lind thought, this shouldn’t be the case, since writing for adults excludes children, while people who write for children include everyone. Children’s literature is thus inclusive and deserves more respect. She also said, “Stories are essential for kids. It’s a question of democracy. When you have the language, you can be part of the society in which you live.”

Throughout the conference, there were parallel presentations on a multitude of issues related to the translation of children’s literature. Many of the lectures sounded interesting (although despite the fact that the theme of the conference was translation, a surprising number seemed only tangentially related), so it was hard to choose which to attend, and perhaps the conference should have been longer so there were fewer choices to make. My favorite presentation was by Belgian Professor Jan van Coillie, who spoke about translating poetry for children, which he views as “the ultimate challenge”. He identified several strategies for translating poetry: repetition (literal translation), addition, deletion, submission, and transmutation. Poetry is especially challenging because the translator must pay careful to attention to the formal, semantic, and pragmatic levels, whereas in other kinds of translation, there isn’t as much interplay between the three levels, nor necessarily as much emphasis on each of them. In addition, Professor van Coillie mentioned how literature can be used for the transmission of norms or morals, and also how there are many different possible text functions (such as recreative, creative, emotive, and educative). He is working on creating a general comprehensive methodology and strategy for translating poetry for children, so his research is fascinating.

Besides all the academic presentations, during the conference, there was also a panel on the history of Turkish children’s literature, a performance of karagöz (traditional shadow puppet theater -- see the photo below), and a presentation on a special Turkish anthology used to educate teenagers about violence.

The Child and the Book Conference and Translating Dialects

I am back from Turkey now and eager to tell you about the the Child and the Book conference, which is an annual conference on children’s literature that focused on translation this year.

I gave a presentation on the translation of dialects in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Alan Garner’s The Stone Book Quartet. In my analysis of those books and their Swedish translations, I identified four major strategies for translating the dialects: standardization (removing the dialect and using standard language in its place), orthography and grammar (using grammatical and orthographic ‘mistakes’ and/or eye dialect), replacement (replacing the source dialect with any target dialect, or one that is geographically, socioeconomically, culturally, or stereotypically a relatively close match), and compensation (employing temporal or regional dialect in different places/amounts). Another possible strategy is omission (deleting any phrases or sections containing dialect), but I didn’t notice that in those two books, probably because not much would have been left if the translators had done that.

What is especially interesting to study in the translation of dialects in children’s literature versus that in literature for adults is whether translators feel more freedom and/or responsibility. Many adults – parents, writers, librarians, teachers, publishers, and so on – believe that children ought not be exposed to dialects; they think that the standard dialect of a language is the only correct one, or the only useful one to know. So I wonder if authors of books for children might feel more hesitant about employing dialects and also if translators of such books might be more likely to standardize the language. My opinion is that if an author has chosen to use a dialect, the translator should attempt to find a way of portraying it in the target text, but that is unfortunately not what always happens.

In the next post, I’ll write more about the conference in general.

Off to a Conference

I am off to a conference in Turkey now, so I will be away from the blog for a couple of weeks, but I will post all about it when I return!

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!

Translating the Koran

According to an article in the New York Times, Laleh Bakhtiar spent seven years on a new translation of the Koran from Arabic to English. The article discusses some of the translatorial decisions and difficulties she faced, including the fact that she had to spend three months on the Arabic word “daraba” alone. According to the article, “[s]ome analysts hold that the verse [i.e. the one containing “daraba”] cannot be rendered meaningfully into English because it reflects social and legal practices of Muhammad’s time.” In other words, some people consider it untranslatable. However, many translations involve significant barriers – linguistic, cultural, and temporal among them – and most translators do find ways of solving them. So though such issues are difficult, a translator can’t merely claim something is untranslatable and then give up.

Eventually, after research, Ms. Bakhtiar came to understand the word “daraba” in a way other than the traditional interpretation and she decided to use that understanding in her translation. As the article points out, “[d]ebates over translations of the Koran — considered God’s eternal words — revolve around religious tradition and Arabic grammar.” Obviously, this is a problem for nearly all religious texts, and translators of holy books have been challenged, threatened, and even killed because of their work. “Ms. Bakhtiar said she expected opposition, not least because she is not an Islamic scholar. Men in the Muslim world, she said, will also oppose the idea of an American, especially a woman, reinterpreting the prevailing translation.”

Translator Edith Grossman

According to today’s Writer’s Almanac, today is “the birthday of one of the few translators who has become something of a literary celebrity herself, Edith Grossman, born in Philadelphia (1936).” In a speech Ms. Grossman gave in honor of Gabriel García Márquez, she said of translation that it “is an act of critical interpretation” and she goes on to discuss the idea of fidelity.

Here is the rest of today’s entry in the almanac, which is interesting because it talks a little about how she got into translation and what choices she made while translation Mr. Márquez:

“Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, but for some reason Grossman became obsessed with the Spanish language when she was in high school. She said, “My high school Spanish teacher just reached me. I said whatever this woman is doing I want to do.”

Grossman won a Fulbright grant in 1963 and went to Spain to study medieval Spanish poetry. But when she began to read the poetry of Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Grossman decided that contemporary Latin American literature was too interesting to ignore. She began translating contemporary Spanish novels, and then in the mid-1980s, she got her big break when she got a chance to translate Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera.

She knew that one of Márquez’s favorite English authors was William Faulkner, so she decided to use Faulkner's style as a guide for her translation. She said, “I didn’t use any contractions in the narration, and I used Latinate words, polysyllabic words, instead of German monosyllables.” When Grossman's translation of Love in the Time of Cholera came out, it was such a success that Grossman was able to quit teaching and begin translating full time. She has since translated all of the new books that Márquez has published.

In 2003, she published a translation of the Spanish classic Don Quixote. Grossman wasn't sure she could do it until she finished the first sentence. Her version of the sentence is, “Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.”

When it came out in 2003, it was hailed as the best English translation of the novel in decades, perhaps the best American translation of the novel ever completed.”

The Lord Conrad Black Trial, Translation, and Learning Languages

Someone recently sent me an article from the International Herald Tribune. It has nothing to do with translation (instead, it is about the Lord Conrad Black trial, in which my father happens to be serving as an expert witness), but I noticed something interesting next to the content of the piece. Besides the usual features, such as “e-mail this article” or “print,” there is a “translate” function. A reader can choose this function in order to get either detailed English definitions of the words in the piece or translations of the words to Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, or German. The service is run by Ultralingua, a company I had never heard of before.

The definitions/translations serve a purpose; namely, for readers for whom English is not their native tongue, this helps them understand any difficult words they come across. However, the service doesn’t recognize numbers or names (“Conrad Black” is suggested to be “Consanguíneo Negro” in Spanish!), and of course there is no way for the machine translations (really just words copied from bilingual dictionaries) to understand or work with the context, which means that the words are translated out of context (i.e. many possible translations are given) and the translations do not become a coherent and complete text. Rather than attempting to be a translation tool, I think this service could instead be exploited for language learning. It would be useful (and fascinating!) for many of us to be able to click on any word on any website and be able to immediately access a detailed definition and translations to a multitude of languages.

Some Recent Reading on Languages

Here are a few interesting, recent articles about language, three from the New York Times and one from the Financial Times.

The first is a book review of two books about English. Readers of this blog already know I am interested in books about language, and I plan to check out When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It by Ben Yagoda and The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left by David Crystal, who has previously been mentioned heree.

The second piece is about the Oxford English Dictionary, and it touches on how the dictionary was created, how words make it in there, word formation, the sources of the citations in the OED, and other topics. As one person says in the article, “It’s not just about the language. It’s about tracking history through the language.”

The other two articles are about the endangered Manchu language of China. The first of these articles details the history of the Manchu people, the dynasty, and the language. Only the oldest generation in a particular region of China seems to use Manchu; an older lady, Meng Shujing, interviewed in the article thinks that only “five or six of her neighbors” can speak it fluently. She is quoted as saying, “I don’t have much time…I don’t even know if I have tomorrow, but I will use the time to teach my grandchildren. It is our language; how can we let it die? We are Manchu people.” The article states that the “disappearance of Manchu will be part of a mass extinction of languages that some experts forecast will lead to the loss of half of the world’s 6,800 languages by the end of the century.” This is a really unfortunate fact. What happens when those languages are gone?

Well, much of the history and culture that were embedded in and preserved in each lost tongue is sadly lost, or become the province of a few experts and/or people have to rely on translators to make the information available to the general public. The second of these two articles on Manchu mentions just this issue. There are apparently many documents about the Qing Dynasty in Manchu, but since so few people know the language, there are only 40 translators working on translating them (presumably to Chinese, although that is not specified): “Scholars estimate that about 20 percent of the 10 million files in the massive Qing archive in Beijing are written in Manchu.” Imagine how long it will take those 40 translators to translate all those files!

Enjoy these varied articles on language!

Translatorial Censorship

In the last post, I quoted from Dr. Marjorie Garber’s book Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, in which she mentioned some translatorial/editorial changing/censorship (or “gender bowdlerization”) of work featuring homosexuals and bisexuals. Unfortunately, this is not a unique or altogether rare phenomenon.

In the special Translating Humour issue of The Translator magazine from 2002, in an article entitled “Francoist Translation Censorship of Two Billy Wilder Films,” Jeroen Vandaele writes about how, during Franco’s regime, translatorial censorship took place of work that was considered inappropriate or immoral. For example, Some Like it Hot might be considered amoral because of issues relating to its portrayal of cross-dressing, the potential gay implications of the movie, and other sexual topics (especially, it might be noted, sexual issues that are outside the realm of what is accepted as “normal”). Dr. Vandaele says that some of the sexual humor in Some Like it Hot and The Apartment was “changed or deleted because of immorality” or “replaced by morality,” and one can assume that if this sort of censorship happened to films, it was part of a general view of culture and society that also affected literature.

Whether for political or other reasons, translators and editors (and other people with power, such as teachers) sometimes censor or change material that they consider improper or otherwise unsuitable. I remember someone who grew up in Iran telling me about seeing foreign films in Iran and then, once she had moved to Europe and later to America, seeing the same movies and being surprised at how much longer they were; in other words, “inappropriate” material had been deleted or changed before the films were deemed acceptable in Iran.

Personally, I’m a strong believer in having as little as possible come between the audience and the text (or film or whatever) as the author (or director or whoever) envisioned it, and I hope that we translators will be cautious about (ab)using the power the wield.

Translating Homosexuality

To continue with the gender theme from the last post…

If you didn’t know it already, translation is everywhere. While reading Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life by Dr. Marjorie Garber (yes, it’s shocking, but I do actually read books on topics other than translation!), a fascinating book that I didn’t expect to relate to translation, I noticed a brief discussion of how translators and editors changed Plato’s Symposium and Shakespeare’s sonnets when they found the genders or sexual identities inappropriate or discomfiting, i.e. when they were not explicitly heterosexual.

Dr. Garber writes: “Thus the Greek word eromenos, meaning “male beloved,” became “mistress,” and the “army of lovers” that would have its historical counterpart in the famous Theban Band of warrior-companions becomes, by implication, a bevy of knights and ladies. The word “boy” in Greek was simply translated as “maiden” or “woman,” thus making same-sex love invisible to the non-Greek reading eye.” On the next page, Dr. Garber mentions Lord Byron who “like the timid translators of Greek…often chose the path of gender bowdlerization in his writing” and she creates the term “textual heterosexual” to refer to those who pass as heterosexual through this “gender bowdlerization” in their writing, or by implication, in translation.

She also points out that correct, non-bowdlerized translations of this sort of material later helped make homosexuals and bisexuals more visible and more accepted.

To be blunt about it, translators have a lot of power, and abusing it by significantly changing texts, including by deleting anything not “appropriate,” is, in my opinion, wrong.

Gender in Translation and Other Challenges

An article by Vivian Eden includes reviews of translations of poetry from Hebrew and French to English, and Dr. Eden, herself a translator, writes that translation is a good way of conversing with and learning from other writers:

“After many years of ruminating on this conundrum, I have come to the conclusion that it is indeed possible to get dead writers to listen to you, in three steps: Read, read, read again and again; formulate your questions or observations very precisely (Do you really need that third drink?); and then again, read, read, read. The texts will tell you what you want to know and confirm, deny or comment on your observations. One of the best ways of carrying out this three-step procedure is by translating.”

Some of the issues this article, and the three books reviewed, brings up are fascinating. For example, what can a translator, whether of poetry, fiction, or non-fiction, do when faced with a word in the source text that has more than one possible meaning? How can the translator decide which meaning to highlight, which one/s to sacrifice?

And what about gender in languages? Linda Stern Zisquit, a poet, describes how she began to translate Yona Wallach’s poetry from Hebrew: “In 1982 I translated several of Yona Wallach's early poems in response to the request of a friend then editing an issue of Hebrew poetry for The Literary Review. I had reservations: My Hebrew was new, and Wallach's reputation - as a masterful poet who fragmented syntax with demonic power and broke laws of male and female conjugation - was intimidating.” The gender aspect is fascinating and it would be interesting to know how translators to and from other gendered languages deal with these issues. How can a translator represent gender, and the breaking of gender rules, in a non-gendered language? Similarly, number is something that can be played with by writers and that can be difficult for translators to portray in the target language. Ms. Zisquit includes notes in the book on the translation and challenges involved in working on Yona Wallach’s poetry, and that is a helpful idea that more translators might want to adopt.

And finally, to continue with the theme of gender, French poet Jacques Reda introduces a volume of his poetry in English translation with an implication that male and female translators are different – one wonders exactly what he meant by that. Mr. Reda, referring positively to his translator, writes: “Perhaps the convergence of these qualities comes as less of a surprise in a woman translator than in a man.”

So what do you think about these issues? Do male and female translators differ, and are they suited for different kinds of work? And what can translators do about gendered languages, numbers, and the multiplicity of meaning that some words or sounds have?

The Translation of Harry Potter

I may be one of the few people not to have read any of the Harry Potter books, but I nevertheless found this article by Daniel Hahn about translating J.K. Rowling’s work interesting.

He writes: “Of the 325 million Harry Potter books sold around the world, some 100 million copies don't contain a single line of JK Rowling’s prose. They’re mediated by the work of other writers who set the tone, create suspense and humour, and give the characters their distinctive voices and accents. The only thing these translators have no impact on whatsoever is the plot, which of course is Rowling’s alone.”

Frankly, I disagree with Mr. Hahn’s description. It’s rather melodramatic, and it makes it seem as though translations have very little in common with originals. The plot is the only thing he mentions, but most translators work very hard to recreate the same “tone,…suspense and humour” and other features of each text; if they are creating new tones or new kinds of suspense or humor, then it seems to me that the translation becomes a different book. Also, of course, some translators do unfortunately change the plot of books they work on. And in some cases, even if the translators don’t change the plot outright, some of the changes they have to make for linguistic or cultural reasons do of necessity affect the plot.

Mr. Hahn also touches on an issue that has been mentioned here before: the invisibility of the translator. He says: “The job of any translator requires that they be simultaneously present and absent; altogether sympathetically embedded in the work and yet totally invisible. And for the most part that invisibility is well maintained.” Today, some people disagree with this idea of translation and the related one of fluency. Personally, I wonder if the concept of in/visibility remains stronger in the translation of children’s literature than in that for adults.

At any rate, whether you are a Harry Potter fan or not, you might want to read about some of the special difficulties Ms. Rowling’s translators face, such as names and invented words. It’s also interesting to consider how today’s technology affects translation; Mr. Hahn mentions some of the requirements that making films out of these books imposes on the translators.

PEN’S Translation Site

PEN has updated their translation page.

Thanks to Erika Dreifus for passing on this resource!

Learning Welsh on St. David’s Day

Today is St. David’s Day here in Wales. David, or Dewi, is the patron saint of the country and it is believed that he died on this day in 589.

So in honor of the holiday, I thought I’d post a few links for sites that will help you learn Welsh. And just as a word of advice, Welsh is not a language to attempt to learn if you are not willing to spend a lot of time memorizing (and, yes, I know, all languages require significant study and memorizing) – together, the various verb forms, the many mutations, and all the ways you can say “yes” or “no” in Welsh make this a challenging language!

Learn Welsh on the BBC’s website

A beginning Welsh course

Enjoy learning Cymraeg!

The Humor (and Poetics!) of Mistranslations

While reading Walter Nash’s The Language of Humour: Style and Technique in Comic Discourse, I noticed a short passage on mistranslations. Mr. Nash refers to the humor that can come from the “excessively literally or misguidedly ambitious” translation. Surely we’ve all sniggered at poor translations in users’ manuals for items manufactured in other countries or while on vacation, whether in hotel rooms or on menus. Maybe some of us have even attempted to politely inform the managers of the restaurants or hotels that the translation was not correct. What’s interesting is that these mistranslations can inspire artists, as in the poem by Robert Graves referred to by Mr. Nash.

Apparently Mr. Graves noticed a badly translated tourist guide and let himself be inspired by it:

«¡Wellcome, to the Caves of Arta!» by Robert Graves

‘They are hollowed out in the see-coast at the muncipal terminal of Capdepera at nine kilometer from the town of Arta in the Island of Mallorca, with a stuporizing infinity of graceful colums of 21 meter and by downward, which prives the spectator of all animacion and plunges in dumbness. The way going is very picturesque, serpentine between style mountains, til the arrival at the esplanade of the vallee called «The Spiders». There are good enlacements of the railroad with autobuses of excursion, many days of the week, today actually Wednesday and Satturday. Since many centuries renown foreing visitors have explored them and wrote their elegy about, included Nort-American geoglogues.’ [From a tourist guide]

Such subtile filigranity and nobless of construccion
Here fraternise in harmony, that respiracion stops.
While all admit thier impotence (though autors most formidable)
To sing in words the excellence of Nature's underprops,
Yet stalactite and stalagmite together with dumb language
Make hymnes to God wich celebrate the stregnth of water drops.

¿You, also, are you capable to make precise in idiom
Consideracions magic of ilusions very wide?
Already in the Vestibule of these Grand Caves of Arta
The spirit of the human verb is darked and stupefied;
So humildy you trespass trough the forest of the colums
And listen to the grandess explicated by the guide.

From darkness into darkness, but at measure, now descending
You remark with what esxactitude he designates each bent;
«The Saloon of Thousand Banners», or «The Tumba of Napoleon»,
«The Grotto of the Rosary», «The Club», «The Camping Tent»,
And at «Cavern of the Organs» there are knocking strange formacions
Wich give a nois particular pervoking wonderment.

Too far do not adventure, sir! For, further as you wander,
The every of the stalactites will make you stop and stay.
Grand peril amenaces now, your nostrills aprehending
An odour least delicious of lamentable decay.
It is poor touristers, in the depth of obscure cristal,
Wich deceased of thier emocion on a past excursion day.