Translation III

The translation of scientific papers and the like is pretty straightforward, if rather formulaic. But I think there is a major step change in the level of difficulty when it comes to literature. Getting the right tone, understanding the subtle nuances of meaning and symbolism must be really taxing, and would need a deep understanding of both languages and their literature. The translator really has to get into the author’s head, to fully understand him or her, before attempting a translation if the work is to be faithfully reproduced.

In part, this must be because English has so many words; there are about 500,000 of them — more than in German and French combined. It’s partly a result of English being a mixture with ancient germanic roots, to which was added some viking and lots of Norman French; and to which lots of words were appropriated from other languages, and from the colonial exploits.

Not all english words are in current use; coney was replaced by rabbit, and tharmes by intestines or guts or bowels. Reflecting its ‘mixed-race’ origins, English often has synonyms or near-synonyms for many things, and sometimes the shades of meaning are subtle. Jack and Jill took a ‘pail’ to get the water, not a ‘bucket’, yet a pail is a bucket. And while you might measure garden manure in bucketfuls, you couldn’t really measure it in pailfuls — it just wouldn’t be ‘right’. (It’s curious, too, that Jack and Jill’s well was on top of a hill, not at the bottom, the obvious place.)

Not all translators stuck rigidly to the idea of an accurate, faithful to the author translation. Sir Richard Burton’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was as much his own work as Omar’s. Burton, too, revised his ideas several times, adding more verses, and changing previous ones substantially. A comparison with a literal translation shows just how inventive he could be.

There’s another interesting take on translation. Orphan Pamuk writes in Turkish, though I gather that he understands English. The primary translation of his (recent) works is into English; great care is taken to get this as accurate to his text, idioms, meanings etc as possible. This english translation is then used for further (re)translations, rather than going directly from the Turkish.



PS For a more extensive treatment of translation (and a translation) have a look at:

Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything: Amazon.co.uk: David Bellos: Books

Translation II

There is a rotunda in the city of Thun is Switzerland that houses a panorama of the city. This was painted a couple of hundred years ago by Marquard Wocher — so it’s called the Wocher Panorama. And very impressive it is too. Panoramas and dioramas were common enough in the nineteenth century, but many of them have now disappeared, so they are relatively rare now.

There was a special exhibition a few years ago to celebrate the bicentenary, with the usual ‘merchandise’, including a book. This described the history of panoramas in general, and how this painting was done, where it had been and exhibited, and how it got back to Thun.

Reading the book, I discovered that these sorts of painters were called ‘little masters’. I didn’t realise at first what was meant by this — I didn’t imagine that whoever did the painting was a dwarf, nor did I think they were somehow second rate. Fortunately, the text was in both German and English, and I found that the ‘little master’ was a Kleinmeister. And yes, the literal word-for-word translation of Kleinmeister is little [or small] master. 

A Kleinmeister is a miniaturist in English, not a very common word. A miniaturist is someone who paints scenes on very small objects. A master or Meister is one who has been admitted to this grade in the guild; to do this, he produces his Meisterstuck or masterpiece to the Guild’s technical committee for inspection, assessment and approval. A masterpiece isn’t necessarily the best work the master will ever produce, even if this is the common meaning nowadays.

A quibble over a single word? Well, yes, but the translation had been done by a professional service, though clearly one without any special expertise in painting techniques. And it was a German service, so I don’t know whether they used a native English speaker for the translation. The rest of the translation conveyed the meaning adequately, even if the phraseology was a bit wooden and stilted at times.

There’s also a tendency to simplification in translations such as this, to leave out things that a German reader would immediately understand, but which an English reader probably would not. I’m thinking of references to things in German culture — the average English reader simply would not get the message in the way that a German reader would.

Translation I

Simplistically, translation is converting one written language into another, and interpretation is converting the spoken word into another (spoken) tongue. Transliteration is really a word-by-word conversion.

A translation ideally reads as if it was the original, but getting the niceties of language and the idioms across isn’t as easy as you might think. It’s straightforward to get the meaning more or less right — we have all seen examples of DIY instructions where the meaning is apparent, even if a bit mangled.

I’ve done some translations from German to English; these were scientific, medical academic papers. This is usually simple enough, provided you know the conventions in the two languages. In other words, you need to be familiar with how such a paper appears in German and how it would appear in English. Such papers usually follow the IMRAD standard — introduction, methods, results and discussion. It’s only the discussion which can be troublesome at times, as it’s opinions and meanings that you are trying to get across.

I sometimes got the papers in German, sometimes as a first draft in English. The papers in English were interesting; there were times when I had to translate back into German to get an idea of what the authors were trying to say, before I could put down what I thought they were really trying to say.

I was asked at times how I would put a German phrase into English, just a phrase in a sentence. I often couldn’t — it wasn’t that I didn’t understand it, it was because the structure of the sentence wasn’t what would be expected in English, the translated phrase simply did not fit in.

In these papers and articles, there are standard forms of expression in both languages. Thus, Darstellung der Gallenblase in German becomes The gallbladder was exposed in English — a literal translation would be exposure [or exposing] [of] the gallbladder. Now, this latter is quite understandable, but it is not how it would be written in English. This is something that the translator just has to know — it’s not enough to know what the words and phrases mean, they have to be rendered into the equivalent words and phrases in English. And the only way that this can be done is through knowledge of the phraseology of both languages as used in the specific academic articles.

After a few goes with translating the academic papers, my solution was simple; I would more or less completely rewrite them. I made sure that all the facts were there, but I would re-arrange the order of things, convert long sentences into two, re-paragraph. In short, I did whatever it took to make it look like an English ‘original’ and not a translation. But then, I did know what the authors were saying, I understood the background and the technical terms; I’d guess that non-specialised translation services would struggle with this.

You might say that it’s the meaning that’s important, the infelicities don’t really matter. Perhaps this is correct, but it’s so much easier to read something that is written fluently, where you just know what it means without having to struggle through it. And if it’s a struggle, you are more likely to give up, or, if you are the peer reviewer, to give up and suggest that it needs total revision. 

Human nature, really.