TTFeb: Way too many words on translation

[superborb]

nnozomi prompted: Anything to do with translation issues (cnovel or otherwise)

I think that translation requires choices, so any good translation must by nature engage with its choices. Not /defend/ exactly, but persuade that those choices are shedding light upon its source. There's two 'choices' that I'm interested in discussing (today) (lol): foreignization (wait, don't go away!) and Nachdichtung and other transformations.

Caveats:

I have many translation thoughts hahahaha. They are still developing! So I have to say, because this is a topic on which I am still actively reading theory and forming opinions, that these are especially subject to growth.

Most of these thoughts are in response to Chinese translations; through poetry club, I've been exposed to a great variety (not exhaustive in any way) of the schools of thought on Chinese poetry translation in particular. And since I am (shockingly???) somewhat literate in Chinese now, it's easier for me to think about. However, on balance, most of the words of translation that I've read in my life are not Chinese, because look, it's going to take a lot of words to beat the sheer length of Russian novels, and there's just /so much/ of the literary canon that is translated from German, French, Spanish etc etc etc.

(I've seen people saying that English doesn't have a good history of translation, and I admit to bafflement. Even if you ignore all the new stuff coming out and topping bestsellers lists, we read quite a lot of works in translation in school?)

Foreignization:

"The project of writing translations that preserve in the the way they sound some trace of the work's "authentic foreignness" is really applicable only when the original is not very foreign at all. [...] In order to even notice that this sentence from German a foreignizing translation is have you to know that in German subordinate clauses at the end their verbs put. Otherwise it is comical, clumsy, nonsensical, and so forth--not "German" at all." David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear.

The debates over foreignization and localization are... endless. So many books and articles and journals. Often it seems like it's something that people /feel/ is correct and come up with explanations to justify why their stance is correct. I will now proceed to explain to you why my stance is clearly the correct one*.

*This is a joke; I understand why people would be further towards either end of the spectrum than me.

I think that a work should clearly define its intended audience and write to that. An audience for translated webnovels not only can tolerate higher levels of 'keikaku means plan', it WANTS that. Bellos writes that 19th century translators of French into English would often do the same because educated people were expected to know some French, and so they would feel satisfied at reading something that felt like they were reading a novel in French. Similarly, Wilt Idema writes in Purpose and Form that his translations of Chinese poetry would be criticized for their lack of chinoiserie. And on and on, many examples of how this feeling of 'ah, I'm reading a foreign work' is desirable by certain audiences, once the audience has been raised to expect a certain 'authentic foreigness'. So, the same feeling that a contemporary cnovel reader feels at recognizing words in pinyin.

But tone is an essential part of the source, and using what parses as awkward phrasing in English to try and convey a sense of the original language just completely loses that aspect. Instead of words dancing on the page, they are-- well, the Bellos quote above makes me frantically rearrange, but when the source is in Chinese, my brain instinctively tries to translate it back into Chinese. In either case, you've lost the original tone, for something different. That's not necessarily bad-- this is where I diverge from my more die hard 'natural English or bust' friends, because I can enjoy a very deliberate, carefully done translation that carries over an unfamiliar cadence. But to convey that, you've made a choice to add in something new, so long as the source was not meant to feel foreign at all.

(Browulf, the Headley translation of Beowulf, remains my favorite, ambitious effort to capture the original tone of a work. Often, of course, other translations capture the tone in a more understated and quiet way, but Browulf sure does make an impression haha.)

I do feel very strongly about when it IS bad though. This comes directly from my experiences as an Asian American and so I understand that other people won't feel this quite as deeply as me! But in the US, 'bad at English' is such a common, strong racist stereotype that to present bad wording as if it were a polished, elegant, faithful interpretation of a Chinese work really disturbs me. So for instance, in the official MDZS translation, when the original source reads smoothly and like a light, casual work, turning it into something that reads very clumsily with invented classist dialect markers is way too far in that direction for my taste. Essentially, I need my foreignization to walk a tight balance of faithfulness to the original, and falling in the direction of 'too much' is way more jarring than playing it safe with idiomatic English.

Nachdichtung and other transformations:

When I was discussing how the arguments against bridge translations (by which I mean, the derogatory way that it was described as someone first rendering the text in a plainer English and someone else taking that and prettying it up, which bears little resemblance to the usual teamwork that occurs) make it sound like a transformative work, x_los  remembered a footnote from Chinese Poetry and Translation that was very relevant: "Discussions of translations of poetry in English and Dutch are hampered by the absence of the German distinction between Nachdichtung and Übersetzung (translation that follows the source text, as distinct from creative rewriting)." This was in the same Idema essay I mentioned earlier. Looking up Nachdichtung online leads to this blog post, which defines it as "a piece of poetry that tries to re-create the spirit in which another piece of poetry was written and its effect on the reader without being literal about it—what's more important is that the new piece is a successful piece of poetry in its own right while staying "true" to the original in a deeper sense."

After that conversation, there was a minor twitter storm over a translator who localized Japanese romance games to English and the sometimes extreme changes required to convey the right tone. That really made me think about how much change might be required to convey the spirit of a work. A subtly separate argument from localization, because localized translation is still carries an expectation of a literal translation, but perhaps there ought to be a space for something more /transformative/.

Of course, this conversation is going to have to engage in some rather controversial translations as a result. I was thinking of two: the Coleman Barks translations of Rumi and Ursula K. Le Guin's Tao Te Ching rendition.

The Coleman Barks translations hugely popularized Rumi, but Barks doesn't know Persian or Arabic. This might not necessarily have led to backlash, except his translations secularize and erase the Islamic context of Rumi's works. (More on that history.) So that's pretty colonialist! Not a good look! Those translations clearly emotionally affected many though, so where is its place? Is it on any level true to the original and so a Nachdichtung? Ought it be considered a transformative work, merely inspired by the previous translations? There's a spectrum that seems to look like literal faithfulness -> spiritual faithfulness -> transformative.

Taoism deeply influenced Le Guin, to the point where e.g. reviews that get all confused over the morals of Omelas and don't mention Taoism at all seem to be rather bad at reading Le Guin. Like Barks, she knew no Chinese, but she also only ever called it an interpretation, a rendition of the Tao Te Ching, explicitly not a translation. And so, having spent a lifetime thinking deeply about Taoism, writing and considering Taoist concepts, and working with experts in Classical Chinese, she produced a work that tried to capture the beauty of the Tao Te Ching. Whether or not she succeeded is beyond the scope of this post, but I think it would be a mistake to dismiss attempts like this out of hand. Does a lifetime of contemplation really not add anything to the conversation around this work? That feels very culturally essentialist.

Anyway! So many good translations giving new insight to works! Also many bad translations trying to obscure parts of works that they don't like! But how else can we communicate across languages and cultures and time but translation?


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Comments

[superborb]

After thinking some more, I think it's not that translating ambiguity is an uninteresting topic, it's that I think discussing it in generalities is perhaps overly difficult and so it'sa topic more interesting when concrete and in the context of specific examples?

[scytale]

Yes, that makes sense to me! I haven't read much of translation theory, so mostly I was thinking in terms of specific examples.

So the first there was haiku translation in English, in which you have to decide how you want to translate it: one line (which is probably the original) or three (which is standard in English? 5-7-5 or not? So that's how you end up with the same poem being translated as two couplets by Nobuyuki Yuasa and one possibly run-on line by Hiroaki Sato. I think there are specific poems in which two translations choose a different subject for a verb, but I couldn't find one.

And then there's polytropos in the Odyssey, which Emily Wilson talks about a lot (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/the-first-woman-to-translate-the-odyssey-into-english.html); tl;dr is that the word describes Odysseus and can mean both "much turning" and "much turned", which can mean that Odysseus is tossed around by fate, or that he's a crafty man. Translators usually end up picking one or the other, and that word choice is the first description we get of Odysseus.

I think that with the literal -> spiritual -> transformative spectrum you proposed, I was originally setting the threshold for literal as a lot more literal than you were, and then finding all those places in which the translator had to make choices on how to represent it, because there was no equivalent -- so even a literal translation is a spiritual translation. But after reading your reply, I think if we view those things as inherent to translation, then we can still come up with a useful definition of a literal vs. spiritual translation. And the nice things about spectrums is that we don't have to place things in rigid boxes. :P

And I probably just need to read more theory that goes over this!

[superborb]

Oh yeah, I guess saying 'literal' translation without defining exactly what I mean was a bit inadequate!

SO much theory to read on this topic!