At 04:31 PM 17/10/2004 +0100, Donna wrote:
>I find books in translation a bit patchy. I think the
extra layer of
>the translation gets in the way and makes me feel a
bit distanced from
>the story and characters sometimes. That's not a very
good way of
>explaining it but it's all I can come up with. I
think the translation
>is a big factor and if I don't particularly like one
book I try and find
>one by a different translator if at all possible. I
find Henning
>Mankell rather flat too Karin (although there was a
lot about the one I
>read that I did like), and because there were parts I
did like, I put
>the flatness down to the translation rather than the
author :o)
>Interesting that you should get that feeling after
reading two different
>translators.
I'm a translator myself, so I tend to give the benefit of the
doubt to the translator. (I might be less inclined to do so
if the shoe were on the other foot.) As in any profession,
there are good, bad and average practitioners, and every
shade in between. In a translation, it's easy enough to
strike a wrong note once in a while, but I think it would be
kind of hard to produce a consistent tone that was at odds
with the original throughout. Generally speaking, if the
writer's sentences are short and clipped, the translator's
tend to be; if the writer's terms are slangy, the
translator's should be, etc.
Ideally, a translation should read as it would if the author
had been able to write it in the target language. Obviously
that's not really possible (or even necessarily possible to
judge that way) because often what is being described would
not happen in the world in which the target language is
spoken. Jose Latour mentioned that difficulty.
><snip>
>A panel I went to at Harrogate with 4 Europena crime
fiction authors on
>talked about this issue. All of them are published in
a number of
>languages and, on the whole they have to rely on
their translators to do
>a good job as they (the authors) have no say in the
choice of translator, nor (mostly) any contact with the
translator (although there were a couple of exceptions to
this). Where they DID have contact with the translators,
these seemed to be the most successful
translations.
It's not surprising that contact between translator and
author results in a better translation. Most of the time I
have questions for the author, whether the text is a Web
site, a business report, a technical paper or a literary
work. The author is in the best position to explain
ambiguities, jargon, unusual idioms and other things
(mistakes) that make a text hard to understand. When you're
simply reading, it doesn't matter to anyone else whether you
understand every single word or idea. When you're reading
with a view to saying the same thing again in another
language for other readers, you have to understand a lot
more.
What is surprising to me is that not all authors hear from
their translators, although strangely, my most unpleasant
experiences have been with the literary authors I've written
to. They're the ones who didn't reply for months, and were
condescending and dismissive. Probably just my bad
luck.
I asked Jose Latour why he wrote Outcast in English rather
than having it translated. But he dodged the question of why
he didn't get a translator when he said that he wanted to
reach a wider English-speaking audience. He admitted that
writing in English was extremely difficult and that he was
dismayed to find out from his editor how many mistakes he
made. I suspect that as he didn't yet have an
English-language publisher, he didn't want to pay for the
translation himself.
By the way, when asked why he had chosen to live in
Canada--and he's only been here a little over a month, having
spent two years in Spain waiting to be accepted--he said it
was the closest thing to a democracy he could find.
Karin
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 17 Oct 2004 EDT