I'm currently reading an English translation of "Giants in the Earth" by O.E. Rolvaag for book club, and as I was noting some passages that I thought were particularly lovely, I started to wonder where the credit for the loveliness was due. There is almost always some direct correlation between words in different languages, but oftentimes there is not (nb: the book "What a Wonderful Word" highlights some really great words that have no direct English translation), and thinking all this through spawned a lot of questions for me. Do translators strive to translate word for word as best they can when they can, or do they instead strive to get the feel for what the original author wrote instead? Or is it something in the middle? I imagine that it varies from book to book as well. Who deserves the credit for the happy arrangement of the words in a translated text? Is a reader inevitably missing out by not reading a book in its original language? It seems almost inevitable that some context would be lost since modern readers, for escape example, don't usually have the same understanding of certain words or phrases as they were used 200 years ago, so how much more is lost in picking and choosing how to put exactly selected words into a language that more than likely doesn't have an exact translation for each?
by My_Poor_Nerves
2 Comments
Usually, it’s somewhere in between. This is why a lot of pun-heavy books can be very difficult to translate. Nobody is going to translate a joke book, for instance.
For poetry, it’s doubly tricky because the rhythm and rhyme scheme aren’t going to be the same in another language. The translator must also be a poet in order to bring the meaning across without losing too much of the “music.”
I think your questions are all valuable to ask and to consider.
It’s best, however, to use specific examples when discussing these problems. Take a sentence and compare it with the original language to see how the translator handled it. Compare how other translators handled it.
In the interests of time and energy, I try to find “red flag” passages. If the translator botched that sentence or word, I know that the translation isn’t worth reading.