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.

The New Sorrows of a Young Translator

After two pages I chucked the thing across the room. I’m telling you, guys, you just could not read that shit. Even with the best will in the world. Then five minutes later I’d got hold of it again. Either I wanted to read till the early hours or not at all. That’s just what I was like. Three hours later I’d finished it.

Guys – I was majorly pissed off. The bloke in the book, this Werther, his name was – he commits suicide at the end. Just gives up the ghost. Puts a bullet through his fricking head because he can’t get the woman he wants, and feels mega sorry for himself the whole entire time.

 

This biting critique of one of the all-time classics of German literature – Goethe’s 1774 epistolary novelDie Leiden des jungen Werther (‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’) – is spoken by the protagonist of another popular German work called Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (‘The New Sorrows of Young W.’), written by Ulrich Plenzdorf and published in 1973. Plenzdorf’s hero, Edgar Wibeau, is seventeen years old and a self-styled ‘unrecognised genius’. He likes painting abstract pictures, listening to jazz and inventing things, none of which are very compatible with being a factory apprentice in small-town East Germany. Edgar therefore abandons his apprenticeship and runs away to Berlin to become an artist. He holes up in a friend’s empty summer house, where he stumbles upon Goethe’s classic novel. It consists of a series of letters written by an emotional young man called Werther, whose verbose, effusive style Edgar initially finds somewhat ridiculous. Eventually, though, Edgar comes to see Werther as a kindred spirit. Both young men are frustrated by the conformist, restrictive worlds in which they live – in Werther’s case the rigidly class-conscious society of eighteenth-century Germany, in Edgar’s the authoritarian regime of the Socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the 1970s. Both protagonists feel unable to express their creativity, fulfil their ambitions, and live authentic lives within the confines of their respective societies, but Edgar expresses his frustrations in an ironic, slangy, modern idiom which is in stark contrast to Werther’s elevated language and tendency to wax lyrical.

 

I had to take all this into account when, as part of my final dissertation for the MA in Literary Translation, I translated the first 10,000 words of Plenzdorf’s The New Sorrows of Young W. The two biggest problems I faced were what to do with Werther – a figure well-known to most German-speaking readers but potentially unfamiliar to English-speaking ones – and how to translate Edgar’s GDR youth slang: should I use 1970s or twenty-first-century slang, where in the world should it come from, and could I make it sound convincing? Both problems turned out to be hugely enjoyable to (try to) solve, and both involved some fascinating research.

 

Plenzdorf’s book is closely tied up with Goethe’s in terms of themes, plot, and characters. Werther, for instance, falls in love with Charlotte, and Edgar with Charlie. Both women are already engaged when Werther and Edgar meet them, and both end up marrying sensible older men. I felt that in order to fully understand and appreciate Plenzdorf’s text, it would be helpful for readers of my translation to know a bit about The Sorrows of Young Werther. I therefore decided to write a Translator’s Preface providing information about the novel for readers who might not have come across it before.

I also had to deal with some direct quotes from Goethe’s text. While living in Berlin, Edgar records several messages to his best friend Willi onto cassette tapes. The messages are all quotations from Werther’s letters, which Edgar uses to express his own feelings and views on the world – in a language, however, that is so alien to poor Willi that he thinks it is some kind of code, and cannot understand a word. Edgar’s mother and father are similarly baffled. I knew that these ‘Wertherisms’ would need to sound as flowery and archaic in English as they do in German to justify the characters’ mystified reactions to them, and to capture the comedy generated in the German text  by the contrast between Edgar’s modern(ish) slang and Werther’s eighteenth-century rhetoric. I decided to lift the Werther quotes from an existing translation of Goethe rather than translating them myself, so that English-speaking readers of my translation might have a chance of recognising them (given that they would be recognisable to many German-speaking readers of the original text). The question was, which of the existing English translations of The Sorrows of Young Werther could supply the antiquated-sounding language I was after? I was thrilled to discover the following passage in a translation by R.D. Boylan from 1854:

Because, on either side of this stream, cold and respectable persons have taken up their abodes, and, forsooth, their summer-houses and tulip-beds would suffer from the torrent; wherefore they dig trenches, and raise embankments betimes, in order to avert the impending danger.

 

Compare this with a 2012 translation of the same passage by David Constantine:

 

Friends, on both banks are the dwelling places of placid gentlemen whose summer-houses, tulip beds, and vegetable plots would be destroyed and who therefore in good time ward off the future danger by damming and diverting.

 

And, forsooth, I compared several different translations but it was Boylan’s – deliciously old-fashioned throughout – that won hands down.

 

When it came to translating Edgar’s language, however, I went in completely the opposite direction and used contemporary slang and colloquialisms, gleaned from slang dictionaries in print and online as well as from personal experience. As Michael Adams observes, ‘[s]lang is fresh and improvised, for the most part young language’ (2009:88). Slang that was in vogue in the 1970s, I felt, would not sound very fresh or improvised today. Slang also ‘indicates that the speaker is fun-loving, youthful and in touch with the latest trends’ (Coleman 2012:71), and I knew that if Edgar was to strike modern-day readers (particularly younger ones) as being ‘youthful and in touch with the latest trends’, he would need to use youthful, trendy slang.

 

I had decided when to locate my slang, then – knowing where it should come from was slightly more difficult. I didn’t want Edgar’s voice to sound too localised, as I felt it might be jarring for the reader to hear a German character speaking like a born-and-bred New Yorker or Yorkshireman, for example. I eventually opted for the strategy suggested by Susanne Ghassempur of using ‘a supraregional colloquial language that is universally understood by readers in the target language’ (2011:54). I tried to use slang and colloquialisms that were not strongly identifiable with any particular place (so Cockney rhyming slang was out, unfortunately!)

 

The work I have done for my dissertation, translating part of Plenzdorf’s text and writing a commentary explaining my translation strategies, has been a lesson in the potential neverendingness of translation. Firstly in the sense that I could work on this project for years – reading and comparing the many English versions of The Sorrows of Young Werther, consulting secondary literature on Plenzdorf and Goethe, researching the historical context of the GDR, poring over slang dictionaries, referring to books and articles on translation theory – without knowing everything there is to know. And secondly in the sense that, as I have realised over the past few months, different people could translate this book (or any book) over and over again forever, and each version of it would always be new, and would never be definitive. Language is always evolving (and slang evolves particularly rapidly). A text can be renewed in translation with each new generation of language users – with each new translator, in fact, since every translator will produce a different interpretation of a given text. The New Sorrows – and Joys! – of every translation can shed fresh light on an original text, and on whole multitudes of new linguistic possibilities.

 

References

Adams, M. (2009) Slang: The People’s Poetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Boylan, R. D. (tr.) (2009 [1854]) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther [Online]. Available at:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2527/2527-h/2527-h.htm [Accessed 6 August 2013]

Coleman, J. (2012) The Life of Slang, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Constantine, D. (tr.) (2012) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Ghassempur, S. (2011) in F. M. Federici (ed)Translating Dialects and Languages of Minorities,Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 49-64

Plenzdorf, U. (1973) Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp (the extract quoted here is from page 36 of the original text and is my own translation).

Letting Go

At the end of this one-year course, we have to write a dissertation. I have chosen to write a translation with a commentary. The subject of my dissertation was to translate 10000 words of a book entitled Petit traité de l’abandon written by Alexandre Jollien who is a disabled writer and philosopher. In this book, he shares his thoughts, and reflects on moments of his life influenced by authors he has read, encounters he has had and approaches to life, religion, relationships and love. Because of his disability, Alexandre Jollien cannot physically write anymore but talks through a recording machine, which gives a distinct oral quality to the book. The commentary is, as I have called it, “a little investigation” on ‘untranslatability’. Indeed, as a translator, I have always been attracted by what we can call the paradox of translation. The idea that some texts seem impossible to translate yet translatable, has drawn me to attempt to produce a translation of Petit traité de l’abandon. I have chosen this source text because of the unique connexion between the author’s background, the source text and its style, which in my opinion makes this text appear impossible to translate. The leading idea of this book is the paradox that Jollien explains of ‘l’abandon’. ‘L’abandon’ means ‘abandonment’ in English but also it is also used in the sense of ‘letting go’. Throughout his book, Jollien explains how paradoxically, ‘l’abandon’, which could be seen as negative, because of its first meaning of ‘giving up’, has actually become the goal of his life. In his own words, the purpose of ‘l’abandon’ is to “follow the flow of life.” (personal translation, 2012: 11)

Thanks to this source text and to the process of the translation, I realised that this concept of ‘letting go’ could be applied to translation. Indeed, as I have explained in my commentary, during the process of translation, the translator has not only to translate the words, but he or she also has to become the author of the translation. In order to do so, the translator has to read, research and even talk to the author of the source text. However all this research will never produce a target text able to recreate similar effects on its readers than the source text readers had. The translator has to combine his or her knowledge on the author, the source text and on the cultural differences with his or her creativity. Translating is ‘letting go’. There will be a moment in the translation process where the source text will not be enough anymore to create a good translation and the translator will have to ‘let go’ of the source text and all its constrains in order to allow his or her creativity to come across.

I realised during this translation that at some point in the process I was ‘letting go’ of the source text without being aware of it and that only then I was able to allow myself, the translator, to translate for the target text readers. I wanted to share this realisation in this blog-post because I am convinced that it can be helpful for young translators just like myself.

Charlotte Laruelle translates French and English, currently doing the MA in literary translation at UEA. Can be contacted at charlotte.bdf@hotmail.fr

Literary and Non-Literary Translation: Studying Translation and a Little Work Experience

One of the best things about the UEA's MA in Literary Translation course, and there are many good things about it, is actually what's not on the course. What I mean is that the lecturers on the course and the staff at the university work very hard, and are very helpful, when it comes to getting students involved in translation related activities outside of class. Internships at the BCLT, the BCLT Summer School, a publishing internship, translation editing workshops in a coffee shop, public lectures with award winning translators, attending conferences, attending the London Book Fair, an award ceremony, talks on comic-book translation in a pub and going to professional networking events are just some of the activites and schemes that have been on offer. It was at the last one – a networking event encouraging UEA students to think about using their language skills in their futures – that I met representatives of a Norwich based data capture company. I then ended up working for them on an interesting translation project for a supermarket in China. I want to say a few things about it here because it's made me think a bit about what do you do as a 'Literary Translator', and what's the difference between translating Literature, and something like a brand of toothbrushes?

So, first of all, what do you as a 'Literary Translator'? Well, I don't feel that I can answer this with any great authority as I'm not published, but it's still an interesting question for me, as it's something I want to pursue. I get the impression that, from a fascinating talk from the Translators in Residence at the Free Word Centre during the LBF, literary translators do a lot. A surprising amount, actually. They teach, write articles, organise games, take part in 'Translation Slams', edit, travel, translate words and, of course, translate literature. In this past year it's been wonderful to see so many literary translators, including teachers at the UEA and translators in London, being involved in different projects linked to their communities. It seems like a major part of literary translation is actually using language skills, critical thinking and decision making skills to work in other areas and fields of study. My experience of working outside of literary translation has been with this company in Norwich. The job involved translating and writing product descriptions for 'everyday' items. In fact, it was more like everyday items in China; some of the names for such items had never been translated into English, and many of the items are rarely seen in the UK. I was challenged by having to translate such words casually appearing on packaging as 阿胶, 牛皮糖, 蛇胆 and 灌肠,  (a quick google translate will let you know why these words might be problematic, and give you a few giggles too!) Being faced with such oddities made me realise that decision making and arguing your case are important parts of being a translator – arguments of whether 牛皮糖 should be 'Chewy Sweets' or 'Leather Sugar' went on for a while – and I think that literary translators develop such skills and apply them to many parts of their working life. I also feel that studying translation has better equipped me with such skills (although I do have room to improve and will keep trying to do so).

Having looked back at a few of my translation problems outside of literary translation has made me think about the difference between literary and non-literary translation. In terms of translating Chinese to English, and this may be true of many other languages including translating from French and Spanish, I don't think there's much difference in the actual process, but there is a difference in the product. Chinese works so differently to English that translating it involves changing almost everything; adding articles, reorganizing sentences, deleting measure words, deciding on tenses and so on. These processes were pretty much the same between my prose translations and the translations for the supermarket. With the supermarket translations, however, the translations had to fit the company's strict guidelines; limited character numbers, information order, use of particular measure words and so on. I've found that with literary translation there is a stronger emphasis on the feel and the style of a text. A lot of the work of other Chinese to English translators, such as Howard Goldblatt, have a distinctive literary feel, and I would also argue, the style of the translator. For example, some Chinese to English translators like to use pinyin to translate the story's characters' names, whilst others prefer to translate the meanings of the names. Goldblatt's translation of Su Tong's Rice(米) included characters like Old Six and Five Dragons, and I think that the decision to do this give the text a particular style, which allowed the translator to put themselves into the text. The freedom to make such decisions about influencing the style of a translated text is at least sometimes the difference between literary and non-literary translation. At least it was in my experience, although this might not be the case in other types of non-literary translation, as there are a lot of types of text out there that need translating. The main thing is that the process of making decisions about changing the text is in many ways the same, even if the product of the translation is not.

Now I'm wondering why I'm talking about non-literary translation on a literary translation blog. Well, I want to say literary and non-literary translation are both very close; literary translators often work on non-literary translation, and they do lots of things to engage people with literature outside of their own work. The UEA's Literary Translation course is well integrated with other areas of translation, and it's given me the opportunity to experience professional non-literary translation. The experience has given me an awareness of some of the skills I have gained on the course, and has taught me a bit about the relationship between literary and non-literary translation. I think both areas work well together, and I'm glad to have had the chance to take part in both (even if just a little). I also think that one of the possible benefits of translators doing so much outside of their 'work', is that this might not only raise awareness of translators and what they do, but also an awareness of foreign literature.

I just want to say something (and feel it important as someone interested in Chinese to English translation) about contemporary Chinese literature. Brendan O'Kane, a great translator of Chinese and blogger, said in a recent interview that 'The more we can do to demystify it [China], through journalism or writing or documentaries, or through Pathlight to introduce people to the idea that there are young Chinese writers working through the same issues that they are – to get people used to the idea that China’s just a place like any other, and not that special. I think that’s a very worthwhile thing to work towards' (theanthill.org 2013:np). I agree with pursuing a 'demystified' view of China and its literature. I think that the brilliant work of translators to intergrate their work with other projects and fields of study can all help with this pursuit. China and Chinese are, for many people I know, still both a far off place and a mysterious language. The problem with such a distance in people's minds is that it can lead to misunderstandings. Working towards clarity can often be, in my opinion, for the best. I hope that brilliant work coming from Chinese to English translators, through routes such as Pathlight, keep up, and that the English language readership will become more and more familiar with great writers such as Qian Zhongshu (钱钟书), Bing Xin (冰心), Bei Dao (北岛), Can Xue, (残雪), Jin Yong (金庸), Yu Hua (余华), Zhang Yueran (张悦然), Liu Cixin (刘慈欣), Ling Chen (凌晨), and many, many, many, more.

Now, unlike Brendan O'Kane who is leaving China, I'm soon going to be off to China to keep reading up on (and perhaps even try my hand at translating) some of the new talent emerging from China.

 

Thomas Newell translates from Chinese into English, and is currently studying for an MA in Literary Translation at the UEA as well as interning for Arc Publications. Contact him at thomashenrynewell@gmail.com.

Beyond the Mother Tongue; Or Translation to Live with

Your trip lasts until you reach home. This is something I heard when I was little, in Japan. This saying, or something like a saying, means that you need to be aware of your journey until you get home. It appears to me when things are about to reach their end. My MA year is about to finish. Over the course of the year, translation and literature have been stuck in my mind – I was thinking about both of them from morning until midnight, even in my dreams. The thing is, this is what I expected before coming to the UK. Indeed, now is the end of the MA, and I am writing my MA dissertation at the moment (as of 5^th Aug.).

 

For my MA dissertation I am working on exophony, a literary phenomenon, where writers choose to write in a language other than their mother tongue. I have been fascinated by this word ever since I came across Yoko Tawada’s collection of essays, Exofonii: bogono soto ni deru tabi [エクソフォニー：母語の外に出る旅] (Exophony: Traveling Outward from One’s Mother Tongue) (2003), several years ago. Tawada is a Japanese writer, but she writes novels and poems in German as well as Japanese. Although there are many exophonic writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky and Joseph Conrad, I am looking at Hideo Levy, an American writer who uses Japanese in his texts. Needless to say, last September I did not have any clues about analysing exophony or having it linked to translation. I have found them, instead, over the course of the year studying the MA in Literary Translation at UEA. This MA has provided me with solid research skills and knowledge in all aspects of translation studies, giving me a new perspective on translation and removing the old. Indeed, I am writing my dissertation with insight I have acquired from four modules: Translation Theory; Stylistics for Translator; Case Studies and Process and Product in Translation. After starting research for my dissertation, I felt translation studies has never paid much attention to the anthropological and ethnographic dimensions of 'foreignness', even though these might provide new kinds of creative exploration, new cross-overs of style and form and genre. Exophony is at the center of these areas; but though my researching of it, however, I also found that it has not been much dealt with in translation studies. Then, I approached some academics outside of my MA, and they kindly advised me about my dissertation. As Google Scholar says, I felt like standing ‘on the shoulders of giants’. I would like to thank Dr. Chantal Wright, Dr. Christopher D. Scott, and Prof. Clive Scott.

 

In spite of still writing my dissertation, I have come up with many interesting topics apart from that of my dissertation. I think this is because, as an international student, a non-native English speaker, studying and living here is inevitable when thinking of two languages. Every time I read text written in both English and Japanese, I think how such text is translated into one of two languages, just as a translator would. It seems that even my personality has been changed by the MA. Studying in bilingual condition reminds me of the  concept of ‘pure language’ (Benjamin 1923), provoking my monolingual mind. What I have leant best though the MA is that exploring between languages is one of the most pleasurable things in life. 

 

Hiromitsu Koiso translates from English into Japanese. His literary interests include world literature, exophony and translation as a creative form of text making. Contact: hirokoikoi@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

The Translator’s Observation

Writers/translators or the relationship between translating and writing is something that really interests me. This semester, I had the opportunity to explore it in my Case Studies essay on ‘hard-boiled fiction’. Even writing this blog post, I’m still thinking, in the same way as a detective about how to write my essay. I still have time – today is the 15^th of April, the deadline is the 24^th of April and my case is not yet solved.

 

In April 2013, I came across news of Murakami’s new novel on the internet. The book is called 色彩を持たない多崎つくると、彼の巡礼の年shikisai wo motanai tasaki tsukuru to kare no junrei no toshi [Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage] by Haruki Murakami. His previous novel, 1Q84, which was based on   George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, achieved record sales that rivalled well as his other novel, Norwegian Wood. Since the publisher announced the release of the new novel, Japanese readers have been desperate to read it; needless to say, that includes me. Murakami is one of the most popular writers in Japan. He is also one of the few world-famous Japanese writers – I think it’s generally agreed that he is the best Japanese writers outside Japan.

 

Murakami is also known as a translator: he translates mainly American literature into Japanese including novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Tim O'Brien and J. D. Salinger. According to Rubin (2012: 103), Murakami has learnt a lot about writing fiction and fiction itself through the process of translation. As Steiner states, ‘[i]n a very specific way, the translator “re-experiences” the evolution of language itself, the ambivalence of the relationship between language and world, between “languages” and “worlds”’(1998: 246). Presumably, translation has enhanced his writing.

 

Several years ago, Murakami published his first translation of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. It can be said that Murakami’s fiction had long been influenced by Chandler, as he is said that he has been a fan since his teens. Indeed, Murakami made use of the word ‘hard-boiled’ style for one of his books Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a fiction constituted by detective pop narrative. Moreover, Murakami described the narrative structure of one of his novels, Wild Sheep Chase as being deeply influenced by Chandler (see Rubin 2012: 81). However, the most important thing Murakami has learnt form Chandler is, I think, a perspective or an; in other word, he sees the world in the same way that Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe sees it, with an objective level gaze. I see evidence of this not only in his fiction but also in his translations.

 

Thinking about the translation of The Long Goodbye, there are two Japanese versions in Japan: one by Murakami in 2007 and another by Shimizu in 1958. The significant difference between the two translations is their strategies for translating. In Shimizu’s version, I found many parts of the source text are omitted by the translator. On the other hand, in Murakami’s translation he makes his translation much more complete.  (Therefore, Murakami’s translation comes to be longer than Shimizu’s.) Murakami’s strategy is close to a ‘literal translation.’: in other words, Murakami is more faithful to the original text – he serves the original writer (Murakami and Shibata 2000: 20). He tried to disappear listening the Chandler’s original voice and attempting to see the world through his eyes.

 

To me, Murakami seems a little like Marlowe himself, a detective, a cool observer.

 

 

Hiromitsu Koiso translates from English into Japanese. His literary interests include world literature, exophony and translation as a creative form of text making. Contact: hirokoikoi@gmail.com

Chinese Children's Literature

 

China has lots of stories. There are all sorts of fantastic tales, about monsters, warriors, ghosts and heroes. It's got the one about the naughty Monkey, who goes on a great journey and fights all the time. It's got the one about the cowherd who falls in love with a goddess. There's a festival in China that celebrates their love. There's the one about a lady who lives forever on the moon, with a rabbit and a lumberjack who can't chop down the cinnamon tree. The stories capture the imagination of children across China.  I remember wanting to read about them when I was at school. But these are old stories. They're really more like folk-tales. You can read them in English, some I did, but they aren't so much translated into English as being written as an English 'version'. There are lots of new ones in China that are popular with children too, but what I want to know is whether or not they can be read in English. Can they excite children who read English in the same way?

 

Over the last few months I have been investigating translated children's literature from mainland China. It hasn't been easy. I know that there is a lot of it in mainland China; the four classics (三国演义-San Guo Yan Yi，水浒传-Shui Hu Zhuan，西游记-Xi You Ji，红楼梦-Hong Lou Meng) all have numerous children's versions and picture books, readily available in book shops, supermarkets and street markets. Writers such as  Bing Xin, Zhang Tianyi, Sun Youjun, Sheng Ye, Zheng Yuanjie, Zhou Rui and many more besides are familiar names in China as children's literature writers. There is also a wealth of online Chinese literature aimed at young adults; if you look them up on book.kanunu.org you will find they are added regularly, and there are plenty of sites that you can find through Baidu (百度一下您就知道). The problem is – an this could be because I haven't looked in the right place – that I can't find much of it in English translation (I think only Sun Youjian has some of his works translated and published that you can find on Amazon...).

 

One  children's story that I have found from mainland China and translated into English is in a collection of Ye Shengtao's works. It's perhaps pertinent to note that Ye is  one of the founders of children's literature in China, or 童话-tonghua, which up until the 1920s did not exist. Children read literature before this, of course, but they read the same literature as adults. Tonghua came about when China was trying to adapt to new ideas from foreign countries. The notion that children were different from, and had different needs to, adults was one of these ideas (for more on this see Dr Ho Laino's essay 'Children's Literature -Then and Now, 1997). This idea seems to have stuck, as there are lots of stories and books published in China, in Chinese, with children in mind. But what I want to know is why does it seem like hardly any of it, if any at all, has been translated for children in English?

 

I've been looking to the translation of Ye's '稻草人’ - Dao Cao Ren – to find out more, as it is arguably his most famous children's story. The translation by Ying Yishi was published in 1987. I've got to admit, the story is an odd one for a children's story, and I'm not sure it's the most likeable one I've ever read. I don't think that as a child (spoiler alert) that I'd like to have read about a girl who gets sold by her alcoholic father and commits suicide, and about a sweet old lady whose husband and son have died tragically, who's lost her money and whose crops are destroyed. Even the helpful scarecrow of the story can do nothing, and in despair drops down in the dirt of the field. It's a bleak tale, and the translation doesn't sugar-coat it.

 

But the translation is interesting. It captures the tone of the original, that of a children's tale, very well. The issue that I have with it is that it was put into a collection with Ye's adult literature – How Mr Pan Weathered the Storm. Its publication like this suggests to me that the translation was more about preserving Chinese 'Literature' in English than about translating a Chinese children's story for children to read. The translation also omits a religious reference from the original, which is perhaps politically motivated, and the scarecrow talks of how he wants to cook up something nutritious, which is translated in a way that would not sound very delicious to a child in English (grub guts and gruel anyone?). I get the impression that although the original was written with children in mind at the time, its translation in 1987 did not share this aim.

 

Because of its  content, it seems like an odd story to translate for children. But why is it one of the only Chinese children's stories in English translation? Julia Lovell, in her article last February for Prospect magazine, noted that anglophone publishers were generally only interested in publishing something which incites controversy -'either sex or politics; and ideally both'. It could be that these publishers think this way because it is what readers want; sex and politics. I've been exploring translating children's literature in terms of Gideon Toury's norms theory, and perhaps such desires are the stronger literary norms in anglophone cultures.  Maybe chinese literature, and even more so for its sub-genres, is marginalised in English. If this is the case, then I see very little hope for literature which is both 'Chinese' and 'children's literature' being translated into English and published.

 

I am, however, willing to think otherwise. There might be a cornicopia of children's literature translated into English out there, and perhaps I just haven't come across it yet. If so, I would love to hear about it and I would love to read some of it. I hope that there is lots out there, and that there is lots more on the way. The sheer size of the country suggests that China has all sorts of interesting people with interesting things to say, and with all sorts of interesting ways of saying them. I know that China has lots of stories to tell, and lots of children's stories that can capture the imagination, and I want to read more of them.

 

Thomas Newell translates from Chinese into English, and is currently a studying for an MA in Literary Translation at the UEA as well as an interning for Arc Publications. Contact thomashenrynewell@gmail.com

‘Foreign lands’ in translations for children

 

Up into the cherry tree

Who should climb but little me?

I held the trunk with both my hands

And looked abroad on foreign lands.

(Robert Louis Stevenson)

Before studying it on the MA in Literary Translation, I hadn’t really given much thought to the issue of translating for children. Which is strange, perhaps, given that one of the stories I loved most as a child was a translated one: Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (also a favourite of the writer Michael Rosen, who is due to give a talk on the book at the Brighton Festival in May.)

The fact that Emil and the Detectives had been translated from German really didn’t matter to me when I read it as a child. What I was interested in were the characters, and the twists and turns of the plot. I certainly don’t remember being put off by what was ‘foreign’ in the story. The question of foreignness in a translated text and how it impacts upon young readers is one I find fascinating, having now explored some of the issues surrounding children’s literature and translating for young readers in more depth.

Do children dislike foreignness in texts, tolerate it, or positively relish it? And is that even a valid question to ask, since it lumps all children together under one umbrella? Children’s reading tastes vary enormously, just as adults’ do; some young readers are more willing to tolerate uncertainty than others, some love strange names or made-up words, some like fantasy and some like football stories. Factors such as age, gender and reading confidence may well come into play here, and a translator needs to bear these in mind when thinking about the target audience for any given translation. But even an individual child’s reading tastes can vary from week to week or from book to book. We should not assume we can always predict what children will enjoy or want to persevere with. Author Gillian Avery celebrates ‘the encouraging thought that you never know what [a child] is going to make of the material with which you confront him’ (1976:33).

Translators for children need to be careful, then, not to jump to conclusions about which elements of a source text their target audience will be interested in or able to cope with. This includes elements specific to the source language or culture – such as names of people or places or historical or literary allusions – that could potentially be unfamiliar to young readers in the target culture (what Ritva Leppihalme refers to as ‘culture bumps’, 1997). When I translated part of a German children’s book called Jette (aimed at readers of twelve and over) I came across several culture-bound elements which I felt might pose a problem for English-speaking readers of my translation.

Names of people and places didn’t actually fall into this category – I retained most of the characters’ original German names unaltered in my translation, knowing that children ‘can and do take delight in the sound and shape of unfamiliar names’ (Lathey, 2006:7). I did adapt the spelling of a couple of names – for instance, I changed the protagonist’s name, Jette (pronounced ‘yetter’), to Etta – but I only adopted this strategy when I felt that the spelling of the German name would cause major pronunciation difficulties in English.

However, when it came to some of the other culture-specific aspects of the text, I felt that a little more intervention was needed. The historical references found at several points in the book were a case in point. The extract I translated contained references to Hitler, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the ‘Ossis and Wessis’ (nicknames referring to the citizens of East and West Germany in the era of the Iron Curtain). I was determined not to delete the references altogether, even though I knew they would quite possibly prove challenging for English-speaking child readers. My feeling was that part of the value of translating this particular book was surely to give English-speaking children an insight into Germany past and present. Göte Klingberg maintains that ‘one of the aims of translating children’s books must be to further the international outlook and the international understanding of young readers’ (1978:86). While I don’t think that this necessarily holds true for every translation, I felt that in this instance the historical references were so central to the text and to an understanding of Germany that it wouldn’t be appropriate to remove them.

Equally, though, if I’d retained them in translation exactly as they were I would have been failing to acknowledge an important fact: that the historical events in question are unlikely to be as familiar to UK children as to German children. I therefore decided to make some additions which would to help explain the references, and make them more accessible to my young target audience. At the same time, I didn’t want to turn an exciting story into a history lesson. I needed to work the explanations into the narrative unobtrusively. It is perfectly possible to do this in translation: Gillian Lathey notes that ‘[a] neatly disguised insertion conveys the necessary culture-specific information without jarring the narrative or alienating the young reader’ (2010:179). I inserted extra information ‘disguised’ as dialogue and free indirect discourse, in the hope that this would prevent the translation sounding too didactic while still helping readers to understand the cultural allusions.

Van Coillie and Verschueren point out that today ‘more and more translators, out of respect for the original text and because they want to bring children into contact with other cultures, choose to retain a degree of ‘foreignness’ in their translations’ (2006: viii). To me this shows an encouraging faith in children’s ability to tackle what is new and unfamiliar. Yes, ‘foreignness’ in a text may present a challenge – but it may also appeal to children’s curiosity, fire their imaginations, enable them (to borrow Robert Louis Stevenson’s words) to ‘look abroad on foreign lands’. And that is an opportunity I don’t think we should deny them.

 

Romy Fursland translates from German and French into English. She is studying for the MA in Literary Translation at UEA and is currently translating a selection of contemporary German poetry for the Translating ‘Live’ Poetry project organised by UCL and Poet In The City (www.ucl.ac.uk/spanishlatinamerican/news_events/repository/translating-live-poetry).

 

References

Avery, G.  in Fox et al (eds) Writers, Critics and Children, 1976

Leppihalme, R. Culture Bumps: An Empirical Approach to the Translation of Allusions, 1997

Lathey, G.  The Translation of Children’s Literature: a Reader, 2006

---- The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible Storytellers, 2010

Klingberg, G. in Klingberg et al (eds) Children’s Books in Translation: The Situation and the Problems, 1978

Van Coillie, J. and Verschueren, W. Children’s Literature in Translation: Challenges and Strategies, 2006