Why it matters. I recall in high school when I read an English translation of Dante’s Inferno (the only way I could read it, being almost completely innocent of Italian), and being impressed at the ability of the translator to take poetry from one language to another.
5 thoughts on “Translation”
Comments are closed.
Funny. 2 days ago I was reading a translated web page discusing a latin American series – the translation was so bad they didn’t even get the genders of the characters consistent. I wonder if they just ran it through Babelfish and called it a day.
“Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei” by Eliot Weinberger presents nineteen translations of a Chinese poem with commentary by Weinberger. He concludes that the best, truest translation was by Ezra Pound, who didn’t know Chinese. Pound took someone else’s English translation and made it a better poem, making it closer to the original in the process. Pound knew the least Chinese, but was the best poet in the group.
http://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Ways-Looking-Wang-Wei/dp/0918825148/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268757955&sr=1-1
Having spent some time in a country where I had to learn a few languages that are vastly different from English (Tagalog, Pagaletok, and a little bit of Ilokano, and various flavors of Zambaleno), I gained a real appreciation for the difficulty of translating things. It’s amazing how difficult it is to make a translation that’s both readable while still staying true to the original intent in the original language.
~Jon
While I understand the need to convey the context of a translated work as much as the need for the literal translation, isn’t that what’s been at the heart of all of the conflicts among the Christian religions and some conflicts with other religions? Everyone has their own contextual interpretation of the literal translation of the Bible, Koran, or Talmud, but nobody can actually agree on which context is correct?
And, I’m not trying to pick a fight here, but it also seems a little bit odd that a translation of a foreign novel is given the leeway of “well, what the author MEANT was…” while those who would use the same argument about the Constitution are soundly (and, depending on the circumstance, rightly) castigated.
A novel isn’t the defining document attempting to restrain the most powerful entity in human history. A slight difference in scope, there…