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

“What if ‘adapted from’ in literature could also mean ‘translated from’?”

I would like to write about the experience I had working on the essay for the module Process and Product. When I started the MA in literary translation, I had a fixed idea on what was a translation and what was not. In my naïve opinion, translations had to be perfect mirroring reproductions of the source text and it was not the translator’s job to include her or his subjectivity. After spending two semesters working on translations, I slowly realised that the perfect translation was impossible. The awareness of this impossibility became the liberating factor that allowed me to call my children’s short story adaptation of Jacques Attali’s book, A brief history of the future a translation. Why? Because it was apparent to me that the process of my adaptation was identical to the process of any other translation. Even though the target text was far more creative than any target text I had ever done, I have never written a more meaningful and purposeful translation.

Attali is a French economist and author, he wrote in this book, published in2006, about the next fifty years of the planet. He explains basically what will happen according to him, what plausible future our behaviour is leading to. But he also makes clear that there is no way to know for sure what is awaiting us but he writes: ‘Finally, I want to believe that the horror of the future predicted here will contribute to make it impossible.’ (personal translation from Attali 2006: 391) In my researches I discovered that three French men have written a series of graphic novels adaptation for adults from Attali’s book. They created a whole story line with plot and characters but it is all based on the future Attali describes. Somehow, this very economical, political book had become very accessible even enjoyable and Attali’s words had spread. When I read the book with the intention of translating it, it seemed evident to me that I wished to translate it for children and therefore I would have to make it accessible to them.

What better audience than children? They will be the first affected with what will happen and yet they are so hard to address to with such complex issues. However, Jean Boase-Beier and Michael Holman (1998: 17) wrote in The Practices of Literary Translation: Constraints and Creativity that ‘the constraints imposed by the presence of a source text empower and enhance the creativity of the translation act by placing the translator in a position of striving to overcome them.’ For this challenging translation, I had to produce a voice and a story that would be enjoyable and relevant for readers between the ages of 11 and 13 and to keep real traces of Jacques Attali’s work. So I created the story of Amy a 12-year-old living in 2073 on what is left of England who finds in her granddad’s study a mysterious paper diary. This discovery leads to a conversation between the little girl and her grandfather about his life and the adventures he had as a transhuman (Attali’s concept of an altruism movement which will help the world to survive what he calls the ‘hyperempire’ and ‘hyperconflict’). Papy, the granddad was born in 2001, which is approximately the year of birth of the readers, so there is a double connexion between the readers and both characters. I had to explain, with accessible words, concepts and ideas from the source text. Papy’s character was very useful as he allowed me to employ words and structures of sentences that 12 year old would not say but would understand. He was definitely a bridge between the source text and the target readers.

In this exercise, maximal relevance was required, as Boase-Beier defines it, ‘Maximal relevance, when applied to the reading of a literary text, suggests that the way the text is formulated will be seen by the reader as especially significant.’ (2006: 49)  Even though relevance was a challenge, I also had constraints from the source text and the author’s intentions, as well as having to take into account my target readers’ background and expectations. All the difficulties encountered in the process of this piece of work made me view literary adaptations as translations more than ever before.

Charlotte Laruelle translates from English into French, currently doing the MA in literary translation at UEA. Contact: charlotte.bdf@hotmail.fr

 

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.

Norwich Papers Needs You!

Norwich Papers, UEA’s journal on translation studies is looking for papers to publish in its upcoming 21st issue. This year we’re looking for articles on the visual side of translation, be that translating the visual on screen, on stage, on paper or even in the reader’s/translator’s mind.

If you have an essay or an article that you’ve always wanted to be published and you think would be right for us, send it to us before the 29^th of March. Now’s your chance!

Please send any enquires to the editorial board at norwichpapers@uea.ac.uk

The Call for Submissions:

In the Mind’s Eye: Translation in a Visual Age

Norwich Papers 2013

The Editorial Board of Norwich Papers 2013 is pleased to announce its call for papers for Issue 21, which will focus on questions of ‘translation in a visual age’. We welcome articles from anyone with an interest in this topic, regardless of experience, and are looking for interesting and original contributions looking at a range of cultures and languages and engaging with the many possible interpretations of this theme. Possible questions addressed could include, but are by no means limited to:

·         Issues related to translating scripts for dubbing or subtitling (for film and television):

Ø  How does the need to match lip movements to spoken text constrain translation?

Ø  How does dubbing affect characterization?

Ø  What is lost in translation because of the time constraints involved in reading subtitles?

·         Issues relating to theatre translation:

Ø  How does the fact that theatre is ‘live’ affect translation, particularly the representation of culturally unfamiliar references?

Ø  What are the issues involved in translating opera or other forms of song? 

·         Issues surrounding translation of comics, graphic novels, and picture books:

Ø   What happens when translation must take into account accompanying visual images?

Ø  Might it be necessary – and is it permissible - to change images to accommodate translated text?

We’re also interested in articles which explore issues related to:

·         Literary visualization

·         The importance for translation of how a text generates cognitive images

·         How an individual reader’s imagination might affect the interpretation of a text

·         Whether language constrains what we can think and imagine

·         How a reader’s cultural background might affect how they visualise elements in a text

We are confident that many who work in the field of translation will find something within this theme that is of interest to them, and we look forward to reading your submission, which should be received no later than Friday the 29^th March 2013. Before sending us your submission, please refer to our style notes and practical guidelines. We are pleased to offer a free copy of Issue 21 to all whose contributions we are able to publish.
You can find more information about our back issues and how to purchase them from our website and blog. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries. We hope that this issue of Norwich Papers will inspire you in some way and we look forward to receiving your contributions.

With best wishes,
The Editorial Team

Translation Internship

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Anyone interested in this position is invited to send their CV and a brief introduction to sinead@novalanguagesolutions.com

We look forward to hearing from you 

What is equivalence for children?

I never thought before starting the MA in literary translation about translation so much. It literally invaded my life! I cannot read a book or the newspaper, watch a film or tell a story from France without thinking about domestication, adequacy or equivalence. I cannot help myself thinking: ‘This does not work.’… ‘They did that well.’… ‘What would be the best way to translate this?’ or ‘What theory is behind that?’ And I realised that translation theories could be applied not only to literary translation but also to every communicational instruments. That realization stroked me, when I thought about people in France who spend their lives surrounded by translation results; about one book published out of six is a translation and most of the films, programs and adverts of television are dubbed, but they do not really think about it or realise it. I personally think that being able to translate is opening a door on a new writer, a new story, a new style to another culture and other people.

I would like to discuss a translation I have done myself for the MA. The book I translated into French was the children’s book The very hungry caterpillar by Eric Carle. I came across several issues with this translation. What theory should I work with? Children’s literature is different from the rest of literature; it is addressed to a very specific audience, with particular needs. Children do not care in what language and what culture the book is from, so I decided to go for a translation following the principal of dynamic equivalence. As Eugene Nida explained in his essay ‘Principles of correspondence’, ‘the relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptor and the message.’ The story must seem as natural for the readers of the target text as it is for the readers of the source text.

So my first issue was the fact that the caterpillar in the original version is a male caterpillar that becomes a butterfly. The problem was that in French noun have an already predetermine gender and in that case, caterpillar in French is feminine ‘une chenille’ and a butterfly is masculine ‘ un papillon’. I remembered as a kid making the association between the gender of the signifier and the representation I was making of the signified, so ‘une chenille’ in my head was a girl, and ‘un papillon’ was a boy. Because the butterfly is used only once in the whole book and the story is actually about the caterpillar, I decided to change the original male caterpillar into a female caterpillar. I thought it would be more relevant or familiar for children.

The second concern I had was with the listing of food there is at a point in the story, the caterpillar in the source text goes through a lot of different types of food that are quite common for French people but I thought that some changes would be needed in order to make it sound natural for a French child without changing the illustrations. So the aliments I changed even though the words are known and used in French are ‘salami’ and ‘cupcake’. I know these words as an adult but I was not sure that every child would know them. So I replaced them by words close to the original ones but words that I was sure children would know better. I used ‘saucisson’ (which is a type of dry sausage very famous in France) for ‘salami’ and ‘muffin’ (even though it is an English word it is commonly used in France) for ‘cupcake’.  The other touch I thought would make the children go ‘I know that’ was to add ‘de Strasbourg’ (from Strasbourg) behind ‘sausage’ as ‘les saucisses de Strasbourg’, which are a famous specialty from that city that kids often have in canteens.

Even though I took liberties for these examples, I tried to stay as close as possible to the original with the idea always in the back of my mind that children do not really care if it is a translation or not, they just want to hear a nice story with which they feel familiar and comfortable. This is the reason why I thought dynamic equivalence would be the best solution for this translation.

Charlotte Laruelle translates from English into French, currently studying for the MA in literary translation at UEA. Can be contacted at charlote.bdf@hotmail.fr

Sorry, What Was Your Name? Translation Theory and the Translation of Chinese Names to English.

Chinese names are problematic in English literature. They often have meanings that are easily identifyable to the Chinese reader, whereas this does not occur so much with English names. They can also be difficult to pronounce for those who are not familiar with pinyin. They then present an even larger issue for literary translation as they get repeated so much, and can be connected to other elements of narratives such as naming ceremonies or word plays. Looking at Cognitive stylistics on the MA in Literary Translation course at the UEA, has helped me see how the translation of names may work, in theory.

When aproaching the theory and practice of translating literature, one idea strikes me as particularily crucial to understanding what happens. This was put forward by Roman Jakobson, and it is the idea that 'languages differs essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.' This is a haunting idea in terms of translating languages. I work on translating Chinese literature into English, and this idea haunts the decisions which I must make about how to express exciting literary features of a Chinese text in English. Chinese does not have articles, gerunds, plural noun forms or tenses displayed through verb forms, but English does. Whilst a Chinese text may convey the meanings of such grammatical structures, it often doesn't need to, whereas in English the text must explicate these aspects. Most of the time the situation of the text, especially in prose texts,  gives an indication of what tense or article should be used. However, the translation of names presents another issue of what is explicated in the Chinese, but what is not obvious to the readers of English from the sound of the Chinese names.

《射雕英雄传》(She Diao Ying Xiong Zhuan -The Eagle Shooting Heroes/ The Legend of the Condor Heroes) Is a Kung Fu classic in Chinese literature. It is currently being translated online, and I recommend anyone take a look at it. It is an exciting novel about the interweaving and action-packed lives of kung fu masters in ancient China, and to me the online translation project of it is just as exciting. The issues of the translation of character names, though, is an interesting one in terms of Chinese-English translation. Even translating the Author is interesting; should I use the English 'Louis Cha' or pinyin 'Jin Yong'? The meaning of Chinese names is often a lot more obvious than it is in English names. Therefore linguistically, one must consider for the purpose of translation what 'must' the names say, and what 'may' the names say. Below is an example in which a key character is introduced in the novel;

这位是杨铁心杨兄弟。

Zhe wei shi Yang Tie Xin Yang xiong di.

This is Yang Tiexin, brother Yang.

The Chinese character's name is Yang Tie Xin, in Chinese, but will this do in English? The literal meaning of the name is 杨 (poplar) 铁 (Iron) 心 (heart). This meaning of these characters in this character's name is available clearly to the reader of the Chinese, so it can be argued that the names should be translated by meaning. One way of looking at this issue, and perhaps trying to solve the problem, is to consider the notions of foreignisation and domestication, as explored by Lawrence Venuti, and make a decision according to the principles of the translator. This is problematic as both translations of 'Yang Tiexin' and 'Poplar Ironheart' are perhaps so unusual as English language names, that they would be foreignising (calling attention to the foreign elements of the text within the target language). I believe, however, that the way to look at this problem, and the way which is perhaps more useful to allow communication between the two drastically different languages of Chinese and English, is to consider the cognitive effects of the style of the text, and in this instance the names.

The arguments about the cognitive effects of language on the reader, as explored by Ernst Gutt, suggests that when translating areas such as this, it is important to consider the processing cost of the target language, in this case the way that the names are written in English. Keeping the names with the pinyin would make the words clear as names, therefore the reader would not need to connect the words deeply to their understanding of their names in reference to English lexis, so this would involve a relatively low processing cost. However, if the character's name were to be translated as 'Poplar Ironheart', then the name would involve the reader in the process of associating the character with the elements and images related to the English language.So this would involve a relatively high processing cost.

Looking at such translation issues in this way allows the translator to think of what the processing cost will be to the reader of the target text; so that they can translate according to what they believe will be the processing cost of the target text in comparison to the processing cost of the source text. As the name in translation of 'Yang Tiexin' involves a relatively low processing cost, which it would to the Chinese reader as it would be taken as a name first before a series of connected meanings, and as the novel is wide spread in popular culture, so demanding a high processing cost over the reading of a name would be antagonist to the source text's popularity, it is perhaps the better choice of translation. Throughout this process the reader is then haunted with this idea; What is the name saying in Chinese, that I 'may' say in English, and what is it saying that I 'must' say? This idea is perhaps so haunting, at least to me, because maintaining the style, in cognitive terms, often means obscuring some of the interesting lexis from the target text. Translating often involves such an engagement with the source text that, as a translator, my instinct is  to celebrate its complex lexis, and even interesting functional language, and favouring one thing over another is often frustrating. However, by understanding more about these theories of translation, I can see that the translation of names, especially from Chinese to English, is no simple matter. And the pronounciation of Chinese names for non-reader or speakers of Chinese pinyin, is also not easy, but I shall leave it there. What was the man's name again...? Yang...?

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