The surgeon, il chirurgo and la cirujana: gender in translation

I have to admit that when it comes to “gender” and “translation”, I get extremely suspicious towards my own ideas on the topic. I had never come across the issue before starting the MA in Literary Translation and I found out that for me dealing with gender and translation is more complicated than I thought. Mainly because my native language is Italian, I’ve always taken for granted the linguistic binary system (masculine-feminine) Italian is based upon. What I had never considered is how much this affects the way I think.
 
As a teenager I was really into riddles and I remember being told a very clever one which in English would sound more or less like this:

A man is driving his son to school, when a terrible car accident happens. The father dies, while the boy is in very critical conditions and needs surgery. An ambulance takes the boy to the hospital, where an astonished surgeon claims: “I can’t operate: he’s my son.” How is this possible?

The answer: “The surgeon is the boy’s mother”.

But when I was told that riddle that answer didn’t even cross my mind. My first attempts at resolving the riddle included miraculous resurrections on the ambulance and soap-opera finales, and it took me years until I finally got it right. Presuming that the original version of the riddle is in English, the ambiguity of the language (genderless, with few exceptions) makes the riddle work very well, but in Italian it works even better.

Because the Italian word for “surgeon”, chirurgo, is masculine and breaks the rules.

The general rule that helps you distinguish a masculine noun from a feminine one is that nouns ending with  –o are masculine and nouns ending with –a are feminine. For nouns belonging to the field of “jobs and crafts”, there are other matching desinences like –tore/–trice and –iere/-iera, that perform the same duties.  

Therefore we have operaio and operaia (worker), but also direttore/direttrice (director) and cassiere/cassiera (cashier).

 
Sometimes the noun doesn’t tell us anything about the gender. It’s the case of preside (headmaster), cantante (singer) and stilista (fashion designer), that don’t vary according to gender. However, we can easily understand whether we are talking about a man or a woman by looking at the accompanying article. Is it il cantante or la cantante? Un preside or una preside? And so on.

Then what happens with a noun like chirurgo? According to the general rule, the boy’s mother would be a *chirurga. Or, at least, *una chirurgo. For historical and social reasons, though, there are some nouns that don’t have a feminine equivalent: chirurgo, avvocato and ministro, for example. There have been some attempts to introduce some feminine equivalents like ministra and avvocatessa, and though in both cases you can actually find those terms in the dictionary, you will also find a “derog.” after them. Feminist translation theorists will please excuse me if I don’t delve deeper into the matter of sexism in Italian jobs and crafts; the only consideration that I’ll make is: no wonder the riddle worked great in Italian, at least ten years ago. Obviously, the more the years go by, the less effective it will be.  

As a translator, I consider this to be one of the rare cases where the genderless ambiguity given by the source text (which was written in English, presumably) is enhanced by gender in the Italian language.

As a final consideration, I wondered whether this riddle could work in Spanish as it does in Italian. It doesn’t. It’s almost impossible to translate. The Spanish feminine word for “surgeon” is cirujana, as opposed to cirujano. Using the masculine to preserve the surprise effect in a Spanish translation of the riddle not only would be stretched and démodé, but also grammatically incorrect.  

 

I’m Elena Traina, and I translate English and Spanish into Italian, and Italian into English. I’m currently studying Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia. My main literary interest is children’s literature, but I’m a great fan of sci-fi, drama and poetry, too. I can be reached at elena.traina39@gmail.com.

My Spanish Summer School and its Challenges

As BCLT intern since January, I’ve had the opportunity to do some really great things that I couldn’t have done otherwise – making posters for the International Literature Reading Group, interviewing Pushkin Press, going to the London Book Fair, and, most exciting of all, attending this year’s Summer School. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect apart from, of course, a bit of translation. And, it turns out, a bit of translation was what we did, along with a bit of editing, a bit of reading aloud, a bit of running around printing (for me anyway) and a lot of laughing. I was in the Spanish group with author Javier Montes and workshop leader, Anne Mclean.

We had two texts to work on, one which we translated in advance and one which we launched into on day one. The text we worked on together, an extract from Javier’s second novel, Segunda Parte, was quite difficult in Spanish and very funny – we wanted to keep the humour and Javier wanted to keep the difficulty. One phrase gave us a big challenge but also a lot of amusement. The Spanish text involves a father reassuring his son that his boyfriend, who has disappeared without a word, is bound to be ok. The father is rather absent-minded but takes time out from this character trait to speak to his son with clarity. The Spanish text has it as ‘aquella tenía aspect de ser una de las sacudidas imprevistas de su despiste’ [that had the aspect of being one of the unexpected jolts from his absent-mindedness]. We didn’t much like ‘absent-mindedness’ and a lot of debate ensued. For a while we had ‘jolted out of his abstraction’ (a bit formal), then ‘jolted out of his daydreams’ (not quite right), ‘jolted out of his own world’ (popular but still not quite right), ‘back from being away with the fairies’ (Javier threatened to walk out). Things went rapidly downhill after this as the debate digressed onto how shrews are related to elephants. In Spanish, ‘pensando en las musarañas’ means to be daydreaming but literally ‘to be thinking of shrews’. Much google image searching ensued on how some shrews have long noses like trunks , followed by much cooing over how cute they were. We ended up with ‘shrugged off his absent-minded façade’ (all happy).

Another challenge was the word ‘cursi’ which, in Spanish, means a lot of different things all at once: tacky, corny, snooty, pretentious, affected, kitch, la-di-da.  To make matters worse the specific word in question wasn’t actually ‘cursi’ but ‘cursilería’, a noun not an adjective. The father says that he hates hearing ‘about the tacky/the tackiness of/some snooty git mention’ the Cinque Terre. We went round and round in circles with many solutions that were too blue to replicate. We wanted a word/phrase that conveyed the pretentiousness of mentioning a holiday destination which marks you as part of a certain set. In the end we went for ‘tacky waffle’ to explain the idea of someone going on and on about something which bores you to death but which they think makes them sound good.

On the Thursday we were joined by editor Ted Hodgkinson which was a very interesting experience, especially seeing as Javier was not used to being edited, and this text had not gone through that process the first time around.  By this point in the week we all knew the text back to front and it was great to have someone else come in to read it to point out the parts where it didn’t really work. A lot of punctuation needed to be changed and, taking advantage of Javier’s absence later in the day, we changed it! A change we tried to make light of in our presentation with ‘live-action’ representations of brackets and dashes which went horribly wrong – one phrase was opened with a bracket and closed with a dash.

That text being finished, we moved on to look at the other excerpt, from Los penúltimos, which we had all translated in advance. You might assume that already having different options written down would make the process quicker but you’d be wrong! It almost made it harder because there were too many options to choose from. For example, in the story a girl is snooping around a boy’s house, she opens a fridge and sees some carrots ‘de poco fiar’, the translations for this were: unsavoury carrots, untrustworthy carrots, dodgy carrots, dubious carrots and questionable carrots. It’s not just that the carrots might be going off but that they might not tell her what she wants to know (she’s examining the fridge to find information on the boy – queue anthropomorphized fruit and veg). In the end the carrots were dodgy. We also had trouble with a pun involving bananas. In Spanish the orange in the fridge was very orange (pun kept as in both languages the word is the fruit and the colour) and the banana was so weary - a banana is a ‘plátano’ and weary is ‘aplatanado’. In English, ‘banana’ is not a word that gives itself easily to punning. First we had a banana which was so bananas (opposite to weariness), then we had a banana that was banana-y (not a pun), then a banana that was banackered or abanandoned (hilarious but no). We had to decide which was more important – the pun or the meaning. If it was the pun then we could choose any fruit and any adjective: melons being melancholy, blueberries being blue, peaches being peachy or cherrys being cheery. If it was the meaning then the banana could be very banana-like to match the orange orange. We went for the banana being so bananaesque.

In the end though, it wasn’t the collaborative translation that mattered the most (though everybody’s texts were amazing – the full texts will go up here). For me it was the process of looking closely at the text, hearing from the author themselves what the text really means and about the nuances that I’d never noticed and seeing other people’s solutions which was so helpful. I would recommend the Summer School to anyone who is looking to be a literary translator, or if you can’t make it/they don’t have your language, I’d also recommend the free plenary sessions, they were extremely enlightening on how to become a translator, how authors feel about being translated, what the editing process involves and what support mechanisms are out there.  It’s amazing to be surrounded by people who share your passion and are perhaps in the same position as you, and above all, it’s really really fun!

 

Emily Rose translates from French and Spanish into English and is currently writing her dissertation on the translation of gender in a 17^th century French text. Contact her here:emilylindarose@gmail.com.

This novel is absurd and unreal… oh wait! It’s set in Mexico

Crime fiction is a genre of literature that it’s full with cultural references, we all know that, but what happens when these cultural references, that in the source culture sound normal and natural, sound completely absurd and impossible in the target culture?

One of the things that differentiate a crime fiction novel from one country to the other is how the crime is handled. Let’s take Mexico for example. Mexico is a country in which the police cannot be trusted. They are corrupt and even worse than the criminals themselves. In the majority of Mexican crime fiction novels, even though the main detective is part of the police force, policemen are there to make the investigation more complicated. They do it either by not wanting to work or by trying to talk the detective out of the case. This behaviour is completely normal for the Mexican reader but it might be very strange for an external reader.

To look at this more closely let’s look at an example from Martin Solares’ novel: The Black Minutes. (2006). This novel contains a vast quantity of cultural aspects that would be seen as strange for other cultures. There is one in particular that could cause so. At one point in the novel the main detective gets into a fistfight with one of his colleagues because he is doing some research on a closed case. The co-worker does not want the main detective to find out more about what happened many years ago, because he solved the case by blaming an innocent man of the crime. The problem is not that the co-worker put an innocent man in jail and he is afraid of others finding out. If the other policeman found out nothing will really happen because the Mexican police is just focus on blaming someone no matter whether that person is guilty or not. The real problem is that that co-worker received a big amount of money for putting that person in jail and he does not want to lose the money (because In Mexico in order to make the police “work” the government needs to promise them extra money to keep them motivated). The main detective is looking into this case because he is working on a murder that could be related.  What could look as absurd for others would be the reaction of both detectives. Instead of handling the problem as civilized people they start a fistfight in the middle of the office. Everyone, including the chief of the police, is watching the fight without doing anything to try to stop it. The fight concludes with the main detective running out of the office with a broken leg while the other policeman tells him to get out of it or otherwise he won’t live for long.

Fist fighting and the lack of formality are completely normal to the Mexican reader. In Mexico the police forces are uneducated; therefore they use street Spanish and have no sense of respect.

All these cultural differences could cause a misunderstanding to the reader in other culture. He/She might consider the novel to be silly, and we as translators have the responsibility to produce a target text that would be received with a similar impact as the source text has.

 

Andrea González Garza translates from English to Latin American Spanish. She is currently doing an M.A in Literary Translation in the University of East Anglia. You can contact here: Ahndiee@gmail.com

Suitable for ages 3 to 103: when children’s books aren’t just for children

I love Winnie the Pooh. There, my secret’s out. I even have two pairs of Winnie the Pooh pyjamas (though on second thoughts, maybe I should keep that one to myself). A. A. Milne’s tales of a bear and his forest companions were a big part of my childhood and when I recently settled down for a nostalgic return to One Hundred Acre Wood (please don’t judge, it’s a stressful term), I realised that Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner are books for adults too.  It’s actually quite common in Britain for writers to create children’s books with dual addressivity (think Alice in Wonderland or The Hobbit). The humour of Winnie the Pooh is specifically aimed at adults as well as children. In fact Winnie the Pooh has a cult status among many young adults (I’m not alone!) and is one of Britain’s best loved children’s books. Emer O’Sullivan wrote an article for New Comparison in 1993 explaining that the book’s charm comes from representing ‘a utopia’, ‘a safe world in which the main occupations are eating, exploration and visiting friends’ (1993: 114). Furthermore, A. A. Milne pokes fun at real life by parodying it through animals.

What O’Sullivan’s article then goes on to examine is of crucial importance for translation: how do you keep this duality in translation? Especially if the target culture does not have a tradition of writing children’s books aimed at anyone apart from children (although how one defines a child and at what age childhood ends is a whole other kettle of fish). O’Sullivan concentrates on the translations of these books into German which have completely ignored the dual element of the texts and aimed them only at children. She says that the first German edition which was published in 1928 and translated by Edith Lotte Schiffer ‘was never more than a moderately successful children’s book [...] it seems reasonable to claim that the comparative lack of status of this translation is a consequence of the way in which aspects which appeal and are addressed to adult readers were translated into German’ (2005: 116). For example, instead of being bitter and sarcastic, Eeyore is reduced to a sad, moaning creature (1993: 117-118).

On the other hand, the Spanish translation by Isabel Gortazar from 2000 seems to have tried to maintain these elements, aiming to make adults laugh as much as children.  When Pooh and his friends go on an ‘expotition’ (Pooh’s word) to find the North Pole, Eeyore says in typically sarcastic fashion, ‘we can look for the North Pole or we can play ‘’Here we go gathering Nuts and May’’ with the end part of an ant’s nest. It’s all the same to me.’ The Spanish version has ‘por mí, podemos ir a descubrir el Polo Norte o dedicarnos a jugar a policies y ladrones. Me da exactamente igual.’ (We could go to find the North Pole or we could play policies and robbers. It’s all the same to me). In the original Eeyore compares going to the North Pole with the idea of playing ‘gathering nuts and may’. But he subtly equates the trip with an absurd version of the game using the ant’s nest. The Spanish makes a play on the game cops and robbers by using ‘polices’ which means nothing in Spanish but is close to policía (police) and obviously looks like a funny plural form of the English ‘police’ which is incorrect. Eeyore remains highly ironic throughout the translation. At a party held for Pooh Bear, Eeyore gets the wrong end of the stick and thinks it’s his party. Upon discovering that he is wrong he says: ‘‘After all, one can’t complain. I have my friends. Somebody spoke to me only yesterday. And was it last week or the week before that Rabbit bumped into me and said ‘’Bother!’’ The Social Round. Always something going on.’’ In Spanish he says: ‘’Después de todo, no sé de qué me quejo. Tengo amigos. Ayer mismo alguien me dirigió la palabra. Y no hace ni una semana que Conejo chocó conmigo y dijo, ‘¡Canastos!’ Una intensa vida social." (After everything, I can’t complain. I have friends. Yesterday someone spoke to me. And not even a week ago Rabbit bumped into me and said ‘Oh gosh!’ Such an intense social life).  It’s clear that Eeyore’s humorous pessimism is alive and well in Spanish.

Generally speaking adults are the ones who buy children’s books and they may well read them aloud to their children, while some may be uncomfortable with the power of adults over the world of children’s literature (they write the book, translate it, publish it and review it) it is undeniable that for a children’s book to garner success it must appeal to adults in some way. Another reason why it is so important to keep any dual addressivity is because it raises the status of the subsystem children’s literature within the wider literary polysystem. Children’s literature is woefully overlooked in translation, especially anything more than picture books and so getting adults involved is a key strategy.  When translators efface certain elements of the source text they’re stamping the text with what Riita Oittinen calls their child image – the ideal child, based on their own childhood and children today, who they have in mind when they write the book. However, some translators of children’s literature need to think about their adult image too. There’s more to consider than the child tucked up in bed waiting for their bedtime story, as translators we can’t forget the adult charged with reading it aloud. When I have children they’ll be hearing Winnie the Pooh whether they like it or not!

For more information see:

O’Sullivan, Emer. (1993), ‘The Fate of the Dual Addressee in the Translation of Children’s Literature’ in New Comparison, no. 16, pp. 109-119.

O'Sullivan, Emer. (2005), Comparative Children's Literature. London and New York: Routledge.

 

Emily Rose translates from French and Spanish into English and is currently doing an internship with the BCLT. Contact her here: emilylindarose@gmail.com.

Can We Find Equivalence in Difference? The Translator’s Paradox

When I started the MA in Literary Translation in September it was not the first brush I’d had with translation theory. I first came across translation when I was on my Year Abroad in Spain taking a class called ‘theory and practice of English translation’. We looked at linguistic theories such as those of Nida, Catford and Newmark. These ideas stemmed from a linguistic view of translation; that a text should be translated based on the concept of equivalence of form, meaning and style. We were mainly looking at the translation of advertisements, slogans, newspaper articles and tourist information. Most of the strategies we used in our translations considered whether the text had a source-language bias or a target-language bias. The former relies on such techniques as word-for-word translation and the latter on free translation. Equivalence played a big role in our translations, so for example translating a proverb with its TL equivalent and using adaptation, so if a text has a reference to cricket, perhaps in French that should be translated to the Tour de France. However, when I arrived at the department of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, I realised there was much more to translation than ‘equivalence’. We looked at the ethics behind this kind of translation, adapting cricket into the Tour de France for a French language target audience would be the worst kind of ‘domestication’ (in Venuti’s terms) because the source culture has been swallowed by the target culture. Furthermore, one has to ask if the target audience isn’t being somehow short-changed with this sort of equivalence. For example, in Spanish there is an idiom ‘mi media naranja’, whose equivalent in English would be ‘my better half’ (when referring to a partner) even though it literally translates as ‘my half orange’. The translator is faced with a dilemma: to translate literally would make no sense to an English reader, but if we use the equivalent, the image of an orange which the source-text reader gets is lost. Does the Target-text reader deserve to get a sense of the Spanish original? Of course, in translation, there is no right answer.

These questions plagued me when I came to do my first proper literary translations. The question that I couldn’t get out of my head was ‘do I want to create a translation which has domesticating or foreignizing effects?’ My natural instinct had always been to make my translation as intelligible as possible for the target audience, even if that meant being quite free with the source language or culture. However, at the beginning of the course I read Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1813 essay ‘On the Different methods of Translating’. He advocated translations that brought the reader toward the author. Perhaps the source language and culture are, in fact, the most important things.

I decided to translate a passage from Entre Les Murs by Francois Begaudeau. It’s a book about life in a suburban Parisian school. Now, if you take Nida’s idea of dynamic equivalence or Schleiermacher’s idea of bringing the author to the reader and change the French education system into an English one so that English readers will understand and perhaps relocate the story to London, I can’t help feeling you would completely lose the point of the novel and also of translation. What is interesting about this book, and so what would encourage any translator to translate it, is its portrayal of pupils in a school in Paris, nowhere else.

However, when I translated my passage, I didn’t really have these ideas in mind. I took a scene where the teacher is pointing out, to the pupils, the kinds of mistakes they make in their writing. I decided to take each fault they made in French and change it to a roughly equivalent fault that children make in English. This works when the passage is out of context, but of course, following from what I’ve just said, why on earth would a French teacher in a French school start teaching his class about English vocabulary? For example, he points out that they constantly write en train de as two words: entrain de. In English this would be translated as ‘in the middle of’. I don’t think any child would attempt to write that in two words. So what do you, as the translator, do? In my equivalent translation I changed the mistake to ‘a lot’ which is often written as ‘alot’. But we’ve already discussed why this won’t work. We need to find a way to represent the French school and the French language in English so that the novel is not assimilated by the target language and culture, but at the same time it must be readable for the target audience. Lawrence Venuti writes extensively on strategies for ‘foreignizing’ a text and at the same time keeping the translator in sight. One can always indicate the translator’s presence using archaisms or unusual sentence structure, though this wouldn’t solve our French-language-in-English dilemma. My only solution is to keep the French children’s mistakes in French and use endnotes or footnotes to give English equivalents, even if they might take up more of the page than the actual text! I’m sure there are other solutions and the book has been translated if anyone is desperately interested in other possible solutions though I haven’t been able to get my hands on it yet so I can’t tell you here.

I have learnt that any translator carries a huge responsibility to represent not just the content of the source text but also the form, the rhythm and the style. The source culture should not be assimilated by the target culture and the translator’s art must be visible for all to appreciate. Translation is not a simple matter of transferring one language into another; ethics will always have a part to play and this makes translator’s choices even more risky, and therefore, even more worthy of our attention.

Emily Rose translates from French and Spanish into English; she is currently studying for the MA in Literary Translation at UEA and will shortly be starting an internship with the BCLT. Contact: emzrose_89@hotmail.com

Theory and Practice, or, How to Wear Two Hats at Once

This semester I feel as if the MALT programme is pulling me in two drastically different directions which (somewhat paradoxically) complement each other, through the modules we’re studying: ‘Process and Product’ and ‘Translation Theory’. I imagine these modules as requiring me to sport two kinds of headgear that are both present in my translator’s dressing-up box. The first is a practical translation hat, but despite the name it’s not practical at all, in fact it’s garishly coloured, many-textured and covered in pompoms, and I can redesign it whenever I choose (encouraged by the very creative seminars we’ve taken part in during the Process and Product course). The second is a translation theory hat, which is much more subdued, and doesn’t fit me quite as well: I have the feeling that I’m trying on someone else’s hand-me-down. It’s really quite heavy because although Translation Theory is a new discipline, this particular hat has been around as long as there have been languages to translate between, and as such it is imbued with a lot of weighty History. Thus my problem is as follows: I have been very much enjoying wearing my practical hat to translate poetry and short stories, and thus I am, at the moment, reluctant to take it off in favour of my theory hat.
I understand the need to possess both hats, because wearing the theory hat helps me learn about what other people do when they’ve got their practical hats on, what others think translators should do when wearing their practical hats, the decisions I myself make when wearing my practical hat and the stylistic and ethical issues faced by practical hat wearers. And vice versa, the experience of wearing my practical hat feeds into the work I do in those moments when I have removed it in favour of my theory hat. But despite this I still don’t feel entirely comfortable translating myself from practitioner to theorist through the substitution of hats.
When I finish the MALT I may decide to consign the theory hat to a dusty corner of my dressing-up box, or give it to a translators’ charity shop (a shop whose only customers are members of a thriving community of translators, rather than one raising money for a dying breed of multilingual bookworms, I hope). But while I am still on the programme I shall continue to strive to find a way to wear both hats simultaneously. As yet I have had little success in this task; the practical hat is too irregularly-shaped for the theory hat to stay on if I try and put it on top, and if I reverse this configuration and put the theory hat on first I can’t help but feel it as a barrier between me and the creativity of the practical hat. Perhaps I shall have to learn to juggle at warp-speed so as to create the illusion of wearing both hats at once, a blurring of the boundaries between practical hat and theory hat, but then of course I’ll have to figure out how to type at the same time. Unless I choose to perform my translations orally rather than writing them down (I’m sure there’s a theory about that; maybe I am getting the hang of this after all…)
Any suggestions for translation hat solutions gratefully received at this address: lucygreaves@gmail.com.

Lucy Greaves translates from Spanish, French and Portuguese into English. She is currently studying the MA in Literary Translation at UEA, and is particularly interested in Latin American literature.

A Rant about finding books in Spanish

It's funny. When I write blog posts on my own blog, I can almost always think of something to day, but when I have to do it for an assignment, it's much more difficult. I’d imagine this also isn’t long enough anyway, and I probably can’t start it with “Today was a lovely day” like I usually do.

I've been trying to find books in Spanish to use for my two essays for Case Studies and Stylistics, but I'm having a very difficult time. It's a bit difficult to find books in Spanish when there's no Amazon in Peninsular Spanish (I'm not sure if there's a Latin American Amazon; must check on that) and Google España keeps giving me results in English.

Luckily, while I was Googling away, it occurred to me that years ago while I was still in university, I ordered a Spanish-French Larousse Grande from a Spanish bookstore and had it delivered to my university in the States. So after some more Googling (oh, how i love that word), I figured out the name of the site. Casa del Libro, or, if you prefer an English name, I suppose it would be something like "Book House" or "House of Books." I think I'm going to stick with "Book House" because then it sounds like a spoof of the Commadores' song "Brick House": 'cos she's a book house / she's mighty mighty, just letting those words come out.'

So I ordered a Spanish translation of Agatha Christie's 4.50 from Paddington in from Casa del Libro. It's my very favourite Agatha Christie book, and I thought it would be fun to write a paper about it (I've read just about all of her mysteries, and I love them). That was over a week ago. The only confirmation I've gotten was one of those automated emails saying "we've received your order," or words to that effect.

But I still haven't gotten the damn shipping confirmation form. Tis madness, I tells ya (as Russell Brand might say). Actually, he'd probably say something more expletive laden (and so would I), but I'm probably not allowed to swear in these things.

But seriously, how the flip am I supposed to get books in Spanish from the inter-webs if I can't even get a damn confirmation from the book shop? There must be an easier way.

[Edit] There is no Amazon Mexico. Why????? There bloody well should be.[/edit]

[Edit 2] Ack, it changed the font on me. Never mind, I fixed it. Damn it, now I forgot what I was going to say. Oh, wait, I remember. I found a copy of 4.50 at Casa del Libro, as I mentioned earlier, but then I was told by one of my lovely class mates that there’s a book shop in London called Grant and Cutler that has all sorts of books in other languages. I went there and got the first Harry Potter book in Spanish, and it’s a really cool shop. In addition to Spanish, I saw books in Portuguese, Russian, French, and even Japanese.

By Sabrina Steiner, Translator and Beatle Queen

Sabrina Steiner translates from Spanish to English and is an ardent Beatles fan. For more Beatle goodness, you can read her blog at http://beatles4life.xanga.com and visit her website at http://www.freewebs.com/beatles4life.

Translators should look at The Sun (but not for too long)

Leave your political hang-ups to one side, you decide which: reading the news from any source is an excitement waiting to happen for the literary translator.
While it could be argued that news journalism is divorced from fiction, storytelling lies at the heart of both disciplines. And the line often blurs: Truman Capote based Cold Blood on real events and Juan Goytisolo weaved in newspaper excerpts in Señas de Identidad.

For the literary prose translator, analyzing and practising journalistic writing is a convenient way of perfecting source language competency. And for the poetry translator, tabloid headlines are especially loaded with stylistic effects and culture-specific references.

Reporting on the UK’s biggest ever diamond heist in 2009, The Sun’s two word effort is a double entendre, heightened by a stress on the syllable where the reader expects one thing, but gets the other (see the picture here). So instead of a ‘Diamond RO-ber-ry’ we get a ‘Diamond RU – bb e-ry’, as the perpetrators wore elaborate latex masks to conceal their identities. My attempt into Spanish – Ladrones Látex – compensates the dactylic (strong-weak-weak) stress of Rubbery with alliteration. Questions of ambiguity also arise - Did the robbers steal latex and, if so, why? Are they made of latex? Why the obsession with latex? - which leave the reader (hopefully) craving more latex.
Whether sonic effect should always be preserved in headline translation, whether we as translators should concentrate solely on conveying information, or whether there can always be a happy medium is, perhaps, another story.

There is, however, scant widespread translation of tabloids (at which point I might say fortunately but I can’t because I, like you, left my hang-ups to one side). Instead, news feature publications such as Le Monde Diplomatique, and news agencies such as Reuters and the BBC specialising in both features and bulletins, receive the most translation. An effective approach to this task requires not only awareness of linguistic differences, but also the journalistic conventions of both source and target communities. To illustrate, I’ll briefly look at news feature writing in Britain and Spain.

Features in Britain tend to put the most important information in the first sentence, acting as a bait which draws in the reader. Facts are then presented in order of decreasing importance, which is often termed the ‘inverted pyramid’. Perhaps this is a throw-back to the days when stories would often be crudely cut short by the printer. Or just the realisation that many readers won’t make it to the end of an article.

In contrast, Spanish features often introduce the hook mid-way into a story, language is more flowery, and sentences are lengthier, and packed with clauses (much like this one). Consequently, news stories tend to be longer, often without the afore mentioned pyramid structure. Working into English, it is feasible to re-structure a story, to drastically cut back on the text in order to transmit the news to the British readership. Without the British readership throwing its stylistic rattle out of the proverbial pram.

--Andrew Nimmo is a translator working from Spanish, Portuguese and French into English. His areas of interest include music, journalism, fiction and film. You can contact him at this.means.nimmo@gmail.com.