Poetry translators – the heavyweights of the translation world?

Before beginning the MA in Literary Translation at UEA, I hardly ever had occasion to translate poetry; indeed, I didn’t really read poetry, having been scared stiff by what was probably inadequate teaching of John Keats and William Blake at secondary school. Finding myself on the MA, and required to produce essays, poems and translations thereof seemed to furnish good subject matter, being shorter and therefore easier to consider than a whole novel, for example. Thus it came about that I studied in depth German poems by Richard Dehmel, French poems by Baudelaire, and Dutch poems by Annie M.G. Schmidt and Ramsey Nasr. And lo and behold, I now find myself looking at 20^th century German poems by women writers for my dissertation.

Since poems are characterised by condensed language that often has more than one level of meaning, with particular attention paid to diction (sometimes involving rhyme), rhythm, and imagery, poetry translation is clearly no mean feat. But how should we, as translators, decide which aspects of a poem we are going to pay particular attention to?

One area we might decide to focus on is the style of a poem: elements such as repetition, iconicity, metaphor and ambiguity. These features and devices merit close analysis because they represent choices on the part of the original author. Or maybe we might decide that what matters most is the sound or rhythm, especially if the poet sets high store by performing her or his poetry. And what should we do if the poem we wish to translate has a strict metre and rhyme - do we try and retain this, at the risk of parodying the original, or do we render it in free verse?

Maybe we might want to take the context of a poem into consideration, or not at all. If the poem is part of an anthology, we may decide it should stand on its own and that we do not need to consider the circumstances under which it was written. Again, we might want to focus on the content of a poem, if we decide this is the most important element. This could certainly be considered to be the case with some of the Holocaust poetry I am currently translating.

If the poems in question are for children, we might want to pay attention to the read-aloud quality of the original poem, and to humour. We might also be more inclined than normal to domesticate, in order to make the translations more accessible to children. Or we might side with Venuti and decide that what counts is to draw attention to the “foreignness” of the original poem, so as not to “erase the cultural values of the source text”.

Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation”. Nonetheless, many poets and translators persist at this “impossible” task, and I have unwittingly found myself climbing into the ring and joining them.

Rebekah Wilson is a freelance translator from French, German and Dutch. For more information, go to www.oxfordtranslations.net.

Watching Shakespeare in Translation

On the occasion of Shakespeare’s 400^th anniversary and perhaps under the auspices of the cultural events leading up to the London Olympics, the Globe Theatre in London had organised the Globe to Globe theatre festival as a part of the World Shakespeare Festival. The premise was that 37 plays of Shakespeare will be performed in 37 different languages consecutively; with each play being performed two or three times. The programme and other official literature highlighted this multilingual aspect of the festival which aimed to cater to ‘audiences from every corner of our polyglot community’.  The festival organisers perhaps did this to make a distinction between ‘nation’ and ‘language’ – an argument used to justify their controversial inclusion of a Hebrew The Merchant of Venice by the Habima National Theatre from Tel Aviv. For me, as an Indian, this distinction between ‘nation’ and ‘language’ is something I take for granted as India is a nation of many languages.

The festival did have two plays from India, or rather from Mumbai – Twelfth Night in Hindi by Company Theatre and All’s Well That Ends Well in Gujarati by Arpana. Also being performed were The Tempest in Bangla by the Dhaka Theatre Company and The Taming of the Shrew in Urdu by Theatre Wallay from Lahore which would have been understood or would appeal to some Indians.  I managed to see Twelfth Night and Taming of the Shrew, as well as Cymbeline in Juba Arabic (From South Sudan), Richard II in Classical Arabic (from Palestine). As a theatre-loving student of literary translation my interest at the start of the festival was to see and enjoy theatre in translation, and I did manage to do this. However, reading the festival brochures, talking to some of the organisers and seeing the particular plays that I eventually did, led me to think about the ways in which nationalisms and national identities are performed.

Interestingly, the only one which did not have a national element, probably due to the reasons mentioned above, was the Hindi Twelfth Night. This production made effective use of the globe stage, with the live music and the performers interacting with the standing crowd. The weather (since it is an open-air theatre) – dreaded British rain – contributed quite nicely especially in the final song which was about the rain.  It was also a production which acknowledged and was quite self-conscious about the fact that it was a translation, a fact I found quite heartening as a student of translation. It used a fair amount of English, contravening the rules set out by the Globe which, according to an insider at the festival, expressly told the various groups not to use English. However unlike some other performances (like the Cymbeline) English was not used merely to reach out to non-Hindi speakers, rather a lot of humour depended on it and on an audience that was multilingual – fluent in both Hindi and English. The way this was achieved was clever and commendable and greatly increased my appreciation of the play. I watched the play with an Indian friend of mine and we both agreed that it was the most fun we’d had in a long time, but we did wonder whether non-Hindi speakers would have enjoyed it. A couple of days later, when I went to see another play, I spoke to a woman who had taken it upon herself to see all the plays in the festival. She said that this production and the Bangladeshi Tempest were her favourites because they ‘stuck most closely to Shakespeare’ and so she could enjoy it without knowing the language.

This play was the first one I saw at the festival, and I have since seen a couple more as mentioned above. However, if someone were to ask me which play I enjoyed the most I would still say Twelfth Night in Hindi, followed very closely by Richard II. In thinking about my responses to the various plays, and degrees of enjoyment (which itself is a dubious and not necessarily fruitful comparison, because of my varying degree of familiarity with the plays, the problems of comparing comedies to tragedies and histories etc.), I have been thinking about the role my national identity plays in the creation of this response. Is the fact that I’m an Indian, and in that I’m more culturally aware of things ‘Indian’ than things ‘South Sudanese’ for instance the reason why I enjoyed Twelfth Night the most? I’d like to think that this wasn’t the case. But, perhaps it had to with the fact that even though I enjoyed the other plays there was a barrier between me and the performers and some members of the audience that I wasn’t able to cross because I wasn’t part of a national community – real or ‘imagined’. The play from South Sudan was, even in the way it was promoted, with people holding south Sudanese flags the primary image, a declaration of a new-nationhood on an international platform, the Urdu play began with an instrumental rendition of the Pakistani national anthem, and the play from Palestine while resonating heavily of the Arab Spring, meant something different and perhaps more powerful and specific to the Arabs in the audience around me, despite the fact that I was in Morocco when the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia began and witnessed first-hand the protests in Rabat.

In the end it made me see that perhaps the distinction made by the organisers of distinguishing between nationhood and language was more about being cautious and politically correct rather than anything else. One of the aims of the festival is to reach out to the various diaspora communities in London. Given this, the choice of Gujarati seems justifiable, but why not Punjabi or Tamil or Malyalam (which has a history of performing Shakespeare in translation), why Hindi? This is not to take anything away from the troupe themselves, who were brilliant, but perhaps this choice was made in order to appeal to ‘Indians’ in general, ‘Indians’ like me, who don’t know Gujarati. If you add to this the fact that the festival ended with a play like Henry V, with its nationalistic undercurrent, in English being performed just after the Queen’s Jubilee, one begins to really wonder what it means for Shakespeare to go globe to globe, to be translated and most of all, for these translations to be watched in London. 

 Anandi Rao translates from Hindi and Arabic to English. She is doing her MA in Literary Translation and is interested in theatre and women’s writing. She can be reached at anandirao88@gmail.com.

My Dream not Come True

A few weeks ago a close friend forwarded me a job post at the British Council with the tag line: ‘Dream Job?’.  Up until then I had always considered my dream job as being a literary translator; spending my days locked up in a small room at a desk, just the text and me, and my trusted laptop of course.  Then, I clicked on the link and realised that what I was looking at was an application for a job I never even knew existed: ‘Literature Adviser to the British Council’, working with translated literature from Turkey in particular.  As I read the job description I realised that this job was the perfect combination of everything I loved: Turkish, literature and translation.  Then, of course reality and that awful feeling of self-doubt started creeping in and excitement soon made way to disappointment, before I had even applied for the position.  Throughout our time on the course it has been made quite clear to us that life after MALTeser-hood wouldn’t be as plain sailing as we would like it to be.  Trying to convince publishers to pay you to translate a novel seems harder than trying to get an original piece of work in print (or in electronic form).  As a consequence, many of us will have to get a ‘proper’ job that pays the bills.  I hadn’t thought about what type of job that would be.  Up until now that is.  Teaching could be nice, I thought, but that would mean getting another degree.  So after getting over my initial reaction, I applied for what appeared to be my new dream-job-on-the-side.   

Many literary translators do their work simply because they have a love of languages and literature.  However, as a translator working with Turkish, a minority language, I have always had slightly stronger motives.  While Turkish novels such as Orhan Pamuk’s Kar (Snow) have been quite successful, the number of Turkish authors being translated into English is rather limited.   I want to change that.  It appears that the London Bookfair also have the same vision in mind and have announced that the market focus of 2013 will be Turkey.  This is an exciting opportunity for Turkish translators like me who live in England and do not have a lot of time to fly back and forth.  Working for the British Council, I would be working alongside the LBF, developing ideas and projects.  Yet another reason to apply for the dream-job-on-the-side.

Filling out the application form, I knew I didn’t have a lot of the credentials needed.  However, I decided to give it my best shot and make the most of my skills and the little experience I had gained over my short time in employment.  

 As our time on the course comes to a close, I wish all of my fellow MALTesers the best of luck at finding jobs as Literary Translators.  Even more so in finding their dream-job- on-the-side.  Although, as I found out, it might end up finding them. 

I didn’t get the job in the end and an opportunity like this will most likely never come up again. I shall try to remain positive in my plight of having to find two jobs.  However, I might set my sights a bit lower this time and simply hope for a job that helps me pass the time while I wait for my real dream to come true.

Selin translates from French and Turkish into English. She is currently studying the MA in Literary Translation at UEA where she did her undergrad in Modern Languages. Her literary interests include magical realism and crime fiction and she occasionally translates Turkish poetry.

Satisfied Feelin’

Strutting through with speed...

Coming down with a bump...

Highs don’t last forever...

For another glorious eight hour night shift, tapping away, out there on...

   Okay, so it wasn’t an all-night-out, Soul-beat dance affair exactly, more me locking myself in with a dead author, for a couple of days, to the sole beat of my long fingers tapping away on the old clavier – my best friends Marvin and Tammi would have to wait a good 48 hours for my renewed attention; I must have been serious!

   Still, when I say 48 hours, I don’t mean 48 consecutive hours – emphasis on the above “days”; these “days” I need my beauty sleep, as any of my so-called friends will confirm...

   Come to think of it, my translation of more than 11,000 words of Christiane Rochefort’s Les Petits Enfants du Siècle, as part of my MA dissertation, was completed in much less than half that time, and with my adviser telling me that my ‘1st draft’ will indeed suffice as my final draft.

   And I have to agree – he types with a conceited grin.

   No, but seriously, the reason I say this – and this my point – is because I could have actually translated those 11,000 words at the same pace before I began my MA course... except that the result wouldn’t have been anything like this one. I’m not at all suggesting that I’ve altered my style of translating, in terms of the physical act; I translate just as quickly, and maybe just as early, whenever I feel it time to begin “the physical act”. Nor I am suggesting that I now translate much better, and that the 11,000 words are superior to those I might have done before the MA course – that all depends on the individual reader. What has altered over time, however, while I’ve been on the MA course, is my mental act of (sub) conscious prefacing, or the thing I carry around with me for however long. Furthermore, I am now just as capable of carrying out my convictions.

   So just what do I mean by those last two lines?

   Firstly, the mental preface thing: Cluysenaar believes that a translation “[m]ust be faithful in any worthwhile way, work on the basis of prior stylistic analysis” (1976:41).  Allow me to quickly clear up the first part of this sentence, the “faithful” bit; the forbidden word – to use it around the translation fraternity is akin to an actor mentioning the ‘Scottish play’ in a theatre’s greenroom, just before a performance... Funny, why am I calling it the Scottish play? This room’s not green... Anyhow, to faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty etc – I’ve a good mind to capitalize them! For me, a translator’s duty is to endeavour to be true to his/her interpretation of the text in question, that is being faithful to the text and that is all s/he can ever do; that is the “worthwhile” way. As for the sentence’s second part, the “prior stylistic analysis”: well, believe or not, but each individual’s interpretation of a text is based on the stylistic choices of the original author, be they conscious or unconscious choices; Tabakowska states that “Stylistic choices reflect a speaker’s (subjective) choice of a given conceptualisation” (1993:7). Sufficed to say, Tabakowska is right, but I could use quotations all day, and I don’t want to. What I will say is that style is an expression of a cognitive state, and, therefore, the meaning we obtain from what is not on the page is driven by what is on the page... Stylistic analysis is thus fundamentally important to the fidelity a translator hopes to achieve, according to that ever-important interpretation.

   So what do I get from believing that? Well, firstly I’ve become better at the prefacing bit, through practice; that kind of reading on two levels, responding in both a reader and translator sense; doing two jobs at ones, it doesn’t have to be such hard work, the two levels complement each other. That’s how we find that ‘voice’. And it doesn’t all happen for me by staring at a page; it can happen while I’m walking my little girl to school, as in retrospectively of course, or even having just nipped downstairs for a bite...

   So to the physical translating, which, I believe, has improved too, in that I don’t find the work as hard as I once did. Something more important, though, is that... well, take the above-mentioned translation as an example: I’m sure that, had I translated the text previous to my MA course, I would, to use a laundry metaphor, have added far too much conditioner, smoothed out all those ‘rough spots’, and been far too keen with the old iron, on those slightly ambiguous bits, to such a point that the text would no longer have belonged to Christiane Rochefort , apart from having her name on the front of the book – there’ll always be a translator’s voice, that’s the interpretation bit, but I would’ve gone a little too far in the wrong direction. Venuti is right only partially, because I’m not talking about some political stance; I’m talking about replicating what a text does for a translator, not foreignisation versus domestication, for the sake of... With Rochefort’s text, I have gone completely against the grain of my writing – or have translated in a way that I never thought I could, rough bits, warts and all. And I think the text is better for it; it’s more it and less me, the perfect ‘blend’, and it wasn’t that difficult. What’s more, I like the feeling. I have truly found what the author’s voice says to me in my translation.

   And I have the course to thank for that. So thank you.

   Thanks more individually to Jean Boase-Beier, BJ Epstein, Valerie Henitiuk, Cecilia Rossi, Philip Wilson, Anne Cluysenaar – the quote – Elżbieta Muskat-Tabakowska – likewise – and to Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell for their patience in letting me get on with my work, and for donating me the title of the blog, just one of many wonderful tunes.

   I’m Chris Rose and have a couple of blogs further down too, about Michael Caine and Tom Stoppard. If you’d like to drop me a line – whether you’re interested in translation or just a fan of Marvin Gaye, Tammi Terrell, Michael Caine films or... – my email address is chrisrose59@hotmail.com

   Thanks for reading.

Viva ,vidi, vici...

Vivas. The mix of anticipation, worry, excitement and enthusiasm serves as an adrenalin-fuelled rollercoaster. The prospect of having to explain your dissertation topic in front of a panel of three stalwarts of translation studies can seem daunting (the fact that one is ten minutes late with nobody to contact to inform said panel of one’s tardiness due to connecting buses running late also adds to the pressure–believe me!)

But after crashing into the room with my breathless apologies, and with no time for delay, the viva commenced...

Oral exams are usually nerve-wracking but on this occasion it was anything but. It actually, in my case at least, was an enjoyable experience. If you’re ever faced with having to attend a viva, I’m sure you would disagree and, of course, I cannot speak for everybody. But after some preamble about what I had written in the abstract and explaining what the ‘umbrella’ topic would be, it turned out that my blindness to what I was really trying to say was revealed to me.

It is rather a lonely experience: an abstract written and sent a month before the viva takes place can always change by the point you reach exam day, with no input from anybody but yourself. This is why the viva is a fantastic experience: it can provide a new focus on the topic from the perspective of not just one person, but three.

My topic shifted during the viva to an idea which was cursorily mentioned in my abstract. However, upon further scrutiny, it was revealed to be the new ‘umbrella’ topic which would easily encompass most things I had planned to incorporate originally. This input showed itself to be most invaluable and I walked away with a reinvigorated sense of direction with the dissertation.

I found it to be extremely informative and the panel ended up picking the relevant threads from my abstract, a sentiment expressed by one member who declared, ‘well, we’ve done the job for him.’ That is of course not strictly true but it demonstrates my point that input from external translation studies forces can provide new insights into one’s own ideas.

The viva should therefore be considered as a conversation, a debate perhaps, where ideas criss-cross and are thrashed out across the table rather than the stilted notion of an oral exam.

Now that I am in the process of writing my dissertation according to the clarification of the topic during the viva, I can honestly say that without it I would be lost! My original abstract was disorganised to say the least, with far too many ideas competing for undivided attention. That is why, in my case at least, it is not always a bad thing when someone comes along and turns everything on its head. What the viva gave me was a meatier topic to discuss i.e. the argument for the translator’s invisibility. There is one downside though: I now have to argue against Venuti and his notion that fluency in a translation always equates to a domesticated translation.

Not the easiest of tasks, I assure you, but that is the point of a dissertation. It allows one to push those extant boundaries and paradigms in translation studies...I relish the challenge!

Adam Kirkpatrick translates from French and Swedish into English and is currently studying towards the MA in Literary Translation at the UEA. He is particularly interested in Fantasy Fiction, Historical texts and the work of J.M.G Le Clézio.       

The End of the Beginning...

As the MA in Literary Translation is coming to an end, I can’t help but look back at all the wonderful opportunities I have been given throughout the course. Not only have I learnt a lot about the theory and practice of literary translation but I have also had the chance to develop further skills which I know will prove indispensable to me in my future career.

Firstly, in October, I was chosen to be one of the interns at the British Centre for Literary Translation. My main task involved using my experience as a library assistant and working with the staff at the BCLT to organise and arrange the books in their library, which is made up of a large number of extremely varied translated novels, poetry and plays as well as translation reference books and journals. The aim was to make this extensive resource more easily accessible to staff and students who could benefit from it. I think this may have been achieved by the newly implemented strictly ordered system and bright yellow labels for each section!

In my role as intern, I also helped to promote the International Fiction Reading Group, run by          Dr. B. J. Epstein and held at the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library. Each month, I designed and displayed posters around the university and city centre. I soon became a member of the group which meets once a month to discuss a work of translated literature, some of which were thoroughly enjoyable whilst others were slightly more challenging (if you ever get the chance to read The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, translated from the Persian by Tom Patterdale, it is worth it in the end!). It was great to be part of such a unique and inspiring reading group and I would love to set up a similar group dedicated to reading literature in translation sometime in the future.

Another role I took on during the course was as a member of the editorial board of Norwich Papers, an annual, student-run journal about different aspects of translation studies. As a team of five, we started off with lots of ideas and plans for our issue of the journal which we decided would be called ‘The Next Big Thing: Current Trends in Translation Studies.’ We set up a blog (http://norwichpapers.wordpress.com/), created a facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/NorwichPapers2011) and decided to add interview and review sections to complement the range of interesting articles we received from around the world. Working on Norwich Papers has required teamwork, organisation and strict time management but I have a feeling we are all going to be extremely happy with what we have achieved when we see the finished product (which should be available in September this year).

Although there is now less than two months left until we have to hand in our completed dissertations, there is still one incredible opportunity to look forward to. The BCLT Summer School. Over the course of five days, a group of literary translators will come together in Norwich, recently named as England’s first UNESCO City of Literature, to work with translators and writers to produce a consensus translation of a text in workshops and attend other exciting translation events. This will be the last in a long list of opportunities and I cannot wait! I’m looking forward to putting what I have already learnt on the MA into action as well as learning a whole lot more!

I guess what I’m really trying to say is thank you to the University of East Anglia, the British Centre for Literary Translation and all the staff and students that have made the MA in Literary Translation such an enjoyable experience.

Fiona Hayter translates from German, French and Spanish into English. She is currently studying the MA in Literary Translation at UEA where she also recently completed an internship at the British Centre for Literary Translation. You can contact her at F.Hayter@uea.ac.uk.

Meddling with Myths: Or, My dissertation, but less serious.

In the beginning was the word. Or the void. Music. A lump of mud fished out of an endless sea. Something big that went bang. Whatever it was, it was at the beginning, and it started it all. It got the ball rolling. Across all cultures, explanations for natural phenomena start with stories. All cultures have myths, tales, fables, folklore about how they came to exist. And the stories change, like flowers springing out of a different soil, growing in different environments, some reaching with their roots deep down into the culture they find, some only lasting a couple of seasons, before they are eradicated, trampled or forgotten. But they all try to cling as tenaciously as possible, like limpets, for survival. As Roland Barthes said, myth ‘is a language which does not want to die’ (1957). And here is where we come in. If myth is a language, it can be made to travel to other lands, cultures and minds – it can be, no, it wants, even needs to be translated (Benjamin 1923; Chesterman 1997). If myth is a language, storytellers are translators, reflecting, refracting, amplifying, modifying those tales for the new audiences. If myth is a language, it cannot be set in stone (Warner 1994). The new audiences, however, will not want sloppy repetitions of a fourth-hand story heard from some guy at the market, with frail horned gods and overhyped floods. They will want the new snappy, snazzy, jazz-handful up-to-date version, with CGI (Culture Generated Innovations) and special effects (Hermans 1996; 2002). To go, please, too – they have a busy schedule. And so we, the translators, the unacknowledged (re)creators of the world, will step into our performance tights, pack our satchels with some theory (and a towel, always bring a towel), grab the academic gloves – in case of critical conditions – and go, towards our goal, towards the creation of the new stories, the new myths. Which are actually the old ones, but with different clothes. We will tell tales of Titans and Olympians, fighting in court (or The Jeremy Kyle show, at the audience’s request) over who owns fire. We will sing of the twelve labours of Heracles, from queuing at the Job Centre to trying to cross Times Square on foot. We will reveal where man-beast Enkidu gets a haircut, before chilling out with Gilgamesh. We will recount of the wolf Skoll’s quest for mouthwash, after he swallowed the sun on Ragnarok. We will spin new stories of the old gods, for a land and age that feel no need for any of their own. And by doing this, we will choose who to let speak, we will give a voice to the unheard, shift perspectives and points of view, manipulate details to let the tales within the tale shine brighter (Tymoczko 2007). We will adapt to the audience, but tell our own tales, with our agendas, our ideologies, our points of view (Holman and Boase-Beier 1998: 9). For, in the end, myths reflect values held dear by the society and culture that created them. In recreating them, translators imbue them with their own belief system. Sneaky. The serious version also contains horrible things like memetics, norms and DTS, stylistics, psychoanalysis, anthropology and sociolinguistics. Oh, and is about 20000 words long. Aren’t you glad I wrote the abridged version? People I have intentionally plagiarised: Mike Carey, Percy B. Shelley, Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman, J.R.R. Tolkien, Cesare Pavese. ---- Alex Valente translates Italian and French into English, and English and French into Italian. He will be starting a PhD in Literary Translation at UEA in October 2012, on the translation of comics (which are really just myths in disguise). He can be found in front of a computer screen reading messages to alex.r.valente@gmail.com.

Sense and Sensibility... and Sensitivity

As students of Literary Translation, we are encouraged to grapple with both, the questions that are directly related to translation practice as well as those that concern some loftier matters. In laying claim to the title of translator and thinking over the responsibilities this title implies, one comes across the issue of identity, among others. In real-world terms, considering this issue might mean the need to take in the scope of various actuals constituting the field and the industry of translation. However, a year of academics makes for good time to consider more elusive aspects of translation and translator's identity. For example, the general concept of 'meaning' may maintain its ability to perplex, yet this perplexity does not translate into an equal amount of confusion over the meaning's place in the work of the translator. The intuitive consensus is that 'meaning', alternatively 'sense', is the translator's primary concern, and the manner it is handled in depends on his or her identity characteristics. Another couple of aspects that fall under the rubric of tricky or elusive are sensitivity and sensibility. Of the two, sensibility seems to be somewhat more ambiguous, if for no other reason than because it sometimes is used interchangeably with 'sensitivity'. Yet, when it comes to the translator's role, distinguishing between the two may have its benefits. It can be seen as part of what Maria Tymoczko refers to as 'self-reflexivity', whereby one makes an effort to become aware of just what parts of one's identity and personality go into the translation process. Lawrence Venuti brings up the issue of sensibility in 'The Translator's Invisibility'. But, rather than talk about sensibilities shared by the author of the original and translator, he employs the term 'simpatico' to designate the kind of affinity that may exist between the two and may be considered by some as most opportune for translating. In the end, he wants to impress on the reader that the notion of 'simpatico', as appealing as it may appear, is largely a mystification, and does more harm than good. To understand his view and put oneself in a position to agree or disagree with him, one would do well to acquire a clearer sense of 'sensibility' as opposed to 'sensitivity'. 'Sensibility' describes one's personality. In other words, it is made up of qualities inscribed within a personality, and ultimately they dictate just how one expresses oneself in response to his or her surroundings. In the case with the translator, this largely means how he or she expresses oneself in response to the specifics of a translation task at hand. 'Simpatico' implies an expectation that a translator's sensibility can be a copy, or at least a close representation, of that of an author, and these two individuals can parallel each other in terms of their 'how'. It is not difficult to appreciate how unrealistic this sounds. Therefore, while thinking about 'sensibility' is important as part of exercising 'self-reflexivity', the translator should be careful not to make a mistake of trying to compare it with the author's sensibility. By contrast to sensibility, practically speaking, sensitivity is outward-oriented. Another way to put it is to say that it is a quality that allows one to take notice of details. So, if sensibility is a matter of 'how', sensitivity in its turn is a matter of 'what'. For translators, this means a capacity for detecting features of the original text, arguably what makes up the initial stage of any translation. Drawing a line between the two in this manner is helpful because, as a result, the translator is brought to recognize that, to have the one and the other assist rather than impede his or her translation efforts, one can start by knowing one's sensibility but can continue by cultivating one's sensitivity. Olessia Makarenia is currently working on her MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. Captivated by the magic of English language and the wonder of Russian literature, she is determined to do her bit by introducing some of the latter into the former and pass occasional, sensitive, judgement on the work that others have done so far.

Further… and further… and further study

I have always been a real geek (after school Latin club: yes please!), and coming to UEA to study the MA in Literary Translation has been a way for me to indulge in further geekery, as well as to propel myself along the path to becoming a professional translator. Now that the MA is coming to an end, however, with my dissertation due in only two months, I am already starting to think about what I might like to study next.

I am writing a dissertation about the phenomenon of pseudotranslation, which is when a text is claimed to be a translation although no source text can be identified, i.e. it is original writing under the guise of translation. Although earlier examples do exist, this phenomenon can be seen as linked to the rise of the writer as original genius during the eighteenth century, because it plays on ideas of authorship and originality which were cementing at that time (there are many other interesting aspects of, and motivations for, pseudotranslation but you’ll have to read my dissertation to find out about those). To learn about this period I have had to delve into the history of English literature, and this research has been fascinating but equally hard work because although I studied languages for my BA and hence know a lot about Latin American literature in particular, I didn’t study English beyond GCSE level. This has made me feel like there are gaps in my knowledge which I will have to plug if I am to fulfil my potential as a literary translator. I know a lot about the literature of my chosen source culture, but perhaps not enough about that of my target culture. What this boils down to, I think, is that although I have read extensively in English, I have never read critically in English.

The MA has also confirmed my suspicion that to translate literature into English requires me to be a great writer in English. I have particularly enjoyed the workshops which ran during our second semester and were based on the kind of workshops that take place on a creative writing course.  In each of these sessions we discussed a piece of translation by one member of the group and suggested ways in which it could be improved as a text in English; from these sessions I learnt more about translation as a writing practice than from any other part of the MA. In the end, translations are rarely read alongside their source texts, and to be successful they must be able to stand independently from the source text as well as to read brilliantly. I imagine that it is through lots of practice and by engaging in close readings of texts (translations and otherwise) that I will move towards consistently achieving this goal.

The upshot of having become aware of all this is that I feel like I could do with a degree in English and Creative Writing so as to produce my best work as a translator. My plan once I finish the MA is to launch myself head first into the world of freelance translation, but the idea of further study is already tempting me. The thing is, I know that if I did take up another course, I would get to the end and feel the same as I do now, that there is so much more to learn. I think I shall have to accept that this is a lifelong challenge and engage in further, and further, and further study accordingly.

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

The post-colonial banyan tree

One of the most interesting things I’ve found while doing the various readings for our Theory course this term is the range of metaphors that are used to describe the process of translation and the final text produced. One such, derived from an Indian context, is that of the banyan tree. Trivedi and Bassnett in their introduction to Post-colonial translation write that the process of translation as undertaken by Sanskrit/Hindi scholars like Tulsi Das can be compared to the “process by which an ancient banyan tree sends down branches which then in turn take root all around it and comprise an intertwined family of trees” (Bassnett & Trivedi 1999:10). When I saw this the first thing I wondered was to what extent this metaphor was India-specific. A quick google search later, I found that while the banyan tree is found in other countries too, it seems to be most prevalent, or most renowned at any rate in India. I even found out – or perhaps rediscovered is a better verb – that it is the national tree of India, something that I was probably taught at some point in a history class at school. I also clicked on a link to a Government of India website which told me that “the roots ... give rise to more trunks and branches. Because of this characteristic and its longevity, this tree is considered immortal and is an integral part of the myths and legends of India. Even today, the banyan tree is the focal point of village life and the village council meets under the shade of this tree.”

One of the interesting aspects of this image is the use of the word “ancient” in the first quote and “longevity” and “immortal” in the second. In a post-colonial context I suppose these are important because they refer to a long and resilient pre-colonial past. But, in the context of translation they seem to suggest that works that are (or perhaps should?) translated are classical and canonical texts. Given the context of the specific example, in which Trivedi makes this remark, the metaphor works.

In general terms it seems to be used as a foil to the metaphor of translation as a form of cannibalism that emerges from Latin America. But, this metaphor, of a Banyan tree, becomes problematic when used as a general metaphor for translation. Should only classical texts be translated? What is the role of the translator, if it is the source text (the main tree) that produces the roots (the translations)? And despite notions of immortality, the tree does die, so how does death factor in? In the end thinking about this metaphor left me with as many questions as it did answers, and I think that is what makes it an interesting metaphor of translation.

Anandi Rao translates from Hindi and Arabic to English. She is doing her MA in Literary Translation and is interested in theatre and women’s writing. She can be reached at anandirao88@gmail.com.

Blog Post 2 or A reflection on theory and practice

As an aspiring literary translator I have struggled with the idea of having to study the theory of translation and have found myself many a time thinking ‘What’s the point of all this?’. But as the semester slowly draws to a close I think I am coming closer to answering a few of the questions that my MA requires me to decipher: Should translators know about theory? And does theory describe what translators do, or is it a practical tool that the translator can use?

In a recent workshop MALT graduate Don Bartlett, who has translated quite a few Scandinavian crime writers, spoke to us about the latest novel he translated by Jo Nesbo called ‘Phantom’. Having only being given 7 weeks to translate this book, I doubt that he was thinking about ‘Polysystem Theory’ (although one could argue that he was trying to get inside the Polysystem of literature) or ‘What would Nida do?’ Like most literary translators, Don never mentioned the word ‘Theory’ when he was talking about his translation process, he only mentioned the word ‘Strategy’, and this is because most theories are descriptive rather than prescriptive. This in turn means that we cannot apply a theory directly to our translation process but we can decide what our strategy is going to be before we start translating any kind of text.

At two ends of the scale, we have been studying Translation Theory whilst looking at experimental translation in our Process & Product class. While theory is rarely ever mentioned in P&P, we are expected to bring our knowledge of theory and demonstrate that we have grown as translators during our time on the MA in our essays. However, there seems to be a gap between practising translators and academics that theorise about translation, most of which tell us how we should translate despite ever having done any translation themselves. They remind me of the food critics who appear on popular cooking programmes, where they are brought in to analyse and nit pick at every dish they are served by the contestants, yet most of them probably don’t cook. It is very easy to analyse and criticise other people’s work but I do sometimes wish that theory was a bit easier to understand. On the other hand, there are academics that also translate as well as theorise and because they have seen both sides of the medallion they know what difficulties the translator faces. It is also interesting to see how theories from other fields can be of benefit to translation. For example Relevance Theory came to us from the world of Communication Studies and was picked up by translation theorists. This is not surprising considering that translation can be seen as an act of communication or the need to express something in a different language. This is my favourite theory (not that one should have favourites!) as, in my opinion, it sums up what I want to do as a translator and that is to get the maximum effect from the minimum effort.

So to answer the above questions: Yes! And No! (for the time being anyway).

Selin translates from French and Turkish into English. She is currently studying the MA in Literary Translation at UEA where she did her undergrad in Modern Languages. Her literary interests include magical realism and crime fiction and she occasionally translates Turkish poetry.

Rorke’s Drift, Michael Caine... and Getting The Old Translator’s ‘Pen to Paper’...

“Your Great Uncle Stan was at Rorke’s Drift when the first shot was fired,” my old dad used to say, before each Boxing Day viewing of Zulu – oh, you must know the one! Written by Cy Enfield, co-produced by Stanley Baker, based on a true-ish story, starring newcomer Michael Caine! The well-to-do Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead – had me fooled at the time! Then again, I was only six when I first saw it... Just where did it all go wrong, eh, Michael? Only kidding...

Yep, Rorke’s Drift. Wednesday 22nd – Thursday 23rd January, 1879, when some 150 British soldiers, each with only one skopos in mind – to be sitting in the old Dog and Duck again on the Old Kent Road (or whichever the road might be) with a freshly pulled pint in front of him – would defend a supply station against some 4000 Zulus, each of which would also have only one skopos in mind – to do to the former what they’d done to 2,000 British soldiers that very morning, over yon mountain, at the Battle of Isandhlwana: to wipe them out and finish the job off.

Well, the good news is that many of those brave – for a stronger epithet! – young men did go on to hold another pint in the old Dock and Duck, and Victoria Crosses were handed out like Smarties to prove it...

One of the scenes in Cy Enfield’s film still gets me to this day: when the Zulus appear for the first time – these weren’t actors but the real thing; that proud and graceful people, and their Chief was played by no other than Buthelezi himself! And when they begin that first charge at the British fort. It’s nail-biting for the boys – another silly understatement. But that wait; each and every one of them sweating more in that minute or so – heck, it must have felt longer! – than they had throughout their entire military careers, before Lieutenant Chard – Baker’s character – finally gives the go-ahead to fire... and not a moment too soon.

But there was, and is, method behind the apparent madness, the one of seemingly allowing the enemy a bit of running space before putting them to the trigger: and I guess that it’s all to do with, well, if they fired too soon, the enemy might be too far away to hit; not only would that then waste bullets but the enemy might gain a decent idea of what they were up against, get their heads down, and move on to a plan B. On the other hand, were the British to fire too late, then they’d inevitably be consumed for being so few – the old Bard would have loved this one, wouldn’t he!

All that being said, whether getting stuck in too early or too late, it turned out that the old chief on yon hill had sent his first wave of sacrificial lambs unto the slaughter merely in order to count the British guns. There was method in that apparent madness, too.
But isn’t this supposed to be a blog about translation? I finally hear you think, faintly, beneath a kind of grating sound – are you scratching your forehead?

And yes, I reply, there’s method in my madness, too.

So here’s my roomy analogy: firstly, there’s the mighty army of translators, who claim – lots of emphasis on “claim” – that they don’t translate a novel until they’ve read it, like it were some four-lined lyrical poem or whatever; and then there are the few of us, yes, myself included – we few, we happy few – who begin the job much earlier than the novel’s final page, and, furthermore, don’t give a Dickens who knows it. I might call this a war between The Practitioners and The Theorists, the latter being the greater army, numerically – though which wouldn’t be the case if two thirds of them were to tell the truth and the remaining third were to do what they ought to do, which is to go away and annoy someone else, or, better still – anything for a laugh – have the courage to do a translation of their own – they certainly wouldn’t have been missed at Rorke’s Drift, would they!

That’s the first part of the analogy: the small army, big army-part.

The second bit is the waiting-to-fire-part – which you may well by now have guessed; I didn’t hear any scratching that time... When to pull that trigger? Or when to put the translator’s ‘pen to paper’?

Only a few weeks ago, I heard PhD student and part-time Lecturer Philip Wilson state that to translate a book without having read a word of it – line by line from the outset – would be no less than “disastrous”. And I do agree, up to a point; though all would depend on the individual translator’s experience, of course, and the particular book, but yes, the potential’s certainly there. You could say it’s like being fired at from a great distance: if the shooter’s not that good, you might just wait for him to run out of ammo and then present him with the sharp end of your tool. But what if he can shoot? Who knows, you might just want to give up and go home for your tea... I guess what I’m trying to say is that the potential for disaster is always there, and that that which fills Philip Wilson with horror – the idea of the translator immediately putting pen to paper – simply multiplies that potential. But it’s not written in stone.

Rather than only translate – in the conventional sense of the word – I also write – again, in the conventional sense of the word; translation is re-writing. Playing in two gardens rather than one, then, as it were, something I believe every translator ought, ideally, to do, allows for a greater perspective. Of course, in the real world, not every translator is going to have the time for both, and there is the argument for the more translation work, the more experience gained.

But the reason for putting my case forward is based on my agreement with something else that Philip said that day – I categorically agree this time. And that is that when we pick up a book and begin to read it, we search for a “way in”; he described it as “looking for a door”, which could be anywhere between the first page and the last – have you ever abandoned a book because it’s simply gotten on your nerves? Oh, don’tget me started on Henry James! Yes, I said Henry James, not James Joyce... Anyhow, my friend Philip is right: that is the process exactly. And for me, that is the moment to put pen to paper, opening the door without banging your head at either side of it for having either rushed or hesitated; not too early, not too late. I can just see the old chief on yon hill, laughing with his ancient companions at the British for having begun to fire too early – “Disastrous!” I hear him cry, holding on to his elderly belly. Or for them having done the opposite: left it too late – “They’ve forgotten which film they’re in!” he screams with delight.

Willard Trask, a prolific and erudite translator for nearly fifty years, said that “Translation is what happens while you do it.” He talked of the “helical” rather than “unilinear”. I think he was talking about the writer’s groove. He, too, never read a book end-to-end before beginning to translate.

We all, of course, know that every book contains two levels of meaning: there is determinate meaning, embedded in the linguistics of the text, which, as Professor Jean Boase-Beier tells us, “demands cultural, linguistic knowledge of the source language; and then the necessary sensitivity of weakly implied or ‘second order’ meanings”. She also asks us: “How do we read and how do we translate what goes beyond the actual words on a page, and how do we ensure literary translations preserve the mind-altering qualities of the original? Style,” she says, “conveys attitude and not just information... it is the expression of mind; and literature is a reflection of mind... we must be stylistically aware...”

Again, I agree, almost wholly. Being stylistically aware is essential, because, yes, the style of an expression “tells us something about the person who uses the expression.” But that idea is also qualified by the above quote “what goes beyond the actual words on a page.” What intrigues me most, though, in Jean’s quotations, is the first of the two questions: “How do we read and how do we translate...? The translator’s “thumbprint” will always exist in a translation, we’re not robots, and that’s the beauty of it; and why we prefer some translations to others. But in order to construct something which might reasonably have been the author’s intention, just maybe we should start to think more about the way we, indeed, read a translation.

Any translator will tell you that s/he reads a book that s/he intends to translate differently to the way s/he reads for ‘pleasure’. And I sometimes ask myself why. After all, is the reader of your translation going to read it so differently to the reader of the source text? A writer doesn’t sit down and think: “I want to fill this next paragraph with adverbs of morbidity! Does s/he? The chronicler sitting on a sand-bag at Rorke’s Drift might have done, when he was able to keep his plume still, but that’s different. Or is it? Wouldn’t those adverbs of morbidity have presented themselves quite naturally within the context? The writer is aware of the process up to a certain consciousness, but, essentially, s/he simply writes, allowing the muse to dictate.

The really interesting – and perhaps crucial – part concerning the source writer’s task, however, is the editing process. For it is here where s/he, paradoxically, goes about trying to make the text read/sound more ‘natural’ in expression – however artificial, this is what we expect as readers; the great literary paradox! In light of this knowledge, then, the question I need to ask is this: Is not our job, as translators, to replicate our experience as readers? I believe it is. And I believe that the secret to a success, or a more ‘faithful’ translation, may lie in that very first reading, in those natural, spontaneous reactions of ours: by going for the jugular once we’ve opened that door. Once we’ve travelled with the flow of the text – the way the original author hoped we might; they don’t sweat over the editing process for nothing! – we may then go about own editing process.

Those who categorically disagree with my theory will tell me that I’ve not given much thought to recurring metaphors, symbols, leitmotif and so on – and what about all those clues in detective fiction? And I say: “But I only noticed that recurring metaphor on page 74 myself! So why should I make it easier for the reader of my translation?” And just as a reader has to turn back a number of pages to confirm that the metaphor is a recurring one, why shouldn’t the translator do the same? Furthermore – scandalously for some – the writer of the source text never set out with the idea of recurring metaphors in the first place – believe me, these things just happen somewhere along the line and writers merely exploit them! We might then, finally, deal with the editing sweat as we were meant to do: in the same fashion as the source text author – if s/he had to go through it, why shouldn’t we?

Gosh, I bet I’m making a lot of translator friends with this piece! And it’s not like I’ve got that many to start with...

But, that’s me and I’m sticking with it... for a while at least...

As for my old dad’s well-worn joke at the beginning of my blog – you don’t have to go back, I’ll tell you now: the line about my great uncle Stan being at Rorke’s Drift when the first shot was fired – his punch line would be: “He was in The Queen’s Head on Stannington Street when the second one was fired...”

I bet my fictitious uncle Stan had already seen the film... Or just maybe he thought Lieutenant Chard had left it that little bit too late... before putting that translator’s pen to paper.

Thanks to Jean-Boase-Beier, BJ Epstein, Philip Wilson, Cy Enfield, Michael Caine, Stanley Baker, to my old dad and my fictitious uncle Stan... and to the Great Zulu people of the Great Buthelezi.

I’m Chris Rose and my details are given further down, just after a previous blog entitled ‘Translating a Tom Stoppard Play on Words’. But if you’d like to drop me a line – whether you’re interested in translation or just a fan of Michael Caine films – my email address is chrisrose59@hotmail.com

On Translation (Re)visions

Identified as “a new international platform for British writing and literature development”, the Norwich Showcase was taking place over the length of several days, offering a plethora of events for those willing to be guided by their literary tastes away from books and to the public celebrations of those same tastes. These celebrations took the shape of presentations, readings, panels, and everything in-between. Translated literature was accorded its share of attention. Ros Schwartz and Frank Wynne, both of them seasoned as well as acclaimed translators, were invited to recast the same literary passage from French to English and to treat an audience to a discussion of the choices comprising their finished versions.

That no translation act is ever a self-contained occurrence and that keeping sight of bigger picture is a must when translation is involved may seem self-evident, but this is something that comes to the forefront in the situations similar to the Translation Slam event with Ros and Frank. This awareness makes it that much more remarkable that little more than an hour was enough to make it possible for the audience to appreciate the difference in the approaches the translators employed. Not only was it a true pleasure to hear Frank and Ros reflect on their engagement with the text, but their voiced musings were insightful and thought-provoking.

For example, in attempt to conjure in the reader's mind the kind of image she felt was most appropriate, Ros opted for a term more precise than in the original text. In it, the author describes how a thought unwittingly turned into an utterance resembles an indeterminate kind of insect flitting pointlessly around a person's head. Ros explained that for her translation is largely about describing in words the pictures emerging in her mind in the process of reading, and it was a moth that she saw in the picture painted by the author. The use of the more precise reference suggests that the reader of the translation would be supplied with a rather specific image. By contrast, reading the original version the reader would be forced to do a mental choosing of his own and quite possibly end up with an image of mosquito or fly.

Though a rather mild case of transformative translation, it does illustrate a major issue in the study of literature. After all, this would be one of the things that literature ultimately does: it feeds imagination. The argument here could be that the form of the text conspires with its other aspects to make imagination come alive. In answering the question about the nature of the insect, Ros would seem to have challenged the reader's right to imagine freely. But what if instead she did the reader a favour: by filling in the blank, by clearing up the hazy, by taking care of a trifle of a moth, might she have released the reader's mind for performing grander flights of imagination? Is metaphorical insect entitled to the mind's creative treatment? Thanks to translation, thinking about imagination can run up some exhilaratingly peculiar routes.

In his turn, when asked about handling culture elements, Frank noted that retaining them in their more or less original form often proves optimal. In fact, certain cultural features are too well known under their proper names for new translations to try to carry out some interventionist or revisionist activity. Thus, there are no Elysian Fields in Paris and no one really would argue with that, being perfectly aware that there is, however, the Champs-Élysées. Translations insinuating the existence of such fields could appear ludicrous. The implication, then, is that if a transplant from a different language has proved itself and is now fully embraced, introducing alternatives is an idle pursuit.

For some, this may be a settled matter. Without clear reasons for doing this, multiplying ways of identifying the same referent may indeed strike one as unnecessary overloading of linguistic and cultural systems. Or, when it comes to translation, would we fare better if willing to unburden ourselves of the notion of redundancy? Since the domain of translation is so favourable to metaphors, this could be a matter of deciding which of the two metaphors should get the better of us: revering these pearls of interlingual carry-over items, or, letting novel translations sprout to see if they result in weeds or flowers. Finding middle ground is always an option, but peeking in at extremes is too gratifying to do without. Raised as a platform for literature development, the Norwich Showcase offered some nice vantage points.

Olessia Makarenia is currently working on her MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. Captivated by the magic of English language and the wonder of Russian literature, she is determined to do her bit by introducing some of the latter into the former and pass occasional, sensitive, judgement on the work that others have done so far.

The Relevance of Theory

As an aspiring literary translator, it seems only natural to question the need to study translation theory. Will learning about different theories really help me to become a better practicing translator? The field of translation often seems to be divided into those that practice and those that theorise, so before beginning the ‘Translation Theory’ module I was unsure whether it would in fact directly affect my own translation practice.

During the course of this module, we have looked at a wide variety of theories including some from a number of other disciplines which have been applied to translation. One example which has particularly interested me so far is Relevance Theory, which we recently studied during a session on cognitive stylistic approaches to translation.

Relevance Theory, as developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in 1986, has been applied to translation by Ernst-August Gutt as in his comprehensive book Translation and Relevance (2000). Relevance Theory is all about communication and Gutt rightly looks at translation as an act of communication. The question really is what exactly are we trying to communicate when we translate?

As Jean Boase-Beier discusses in her 2004 article, ‘Knowing and not knowing: style, intention and the translation of a Holocaust poem’ perhaps the most significant aspect of Relevance Theory for us as translators is the notion of author intention. Sperber and Wilson (1986) stated that “the crucial mental faculty that enables human beings to communicate with one another is the ability to draw inferences from people’s behaviour.” In other words, we always have to work out what exactly the “informative intention” of the communicator is. Therefore, the recreation of the intention of the original author is arguably the most important task of the translator. We should try to convey what it is exactly that the author of the source text really meant.

The claim that it is possible to know the intention of the author has frequently been contended and it is true that we can never know this for certain. However, it is in fact possible to use clues in the text to reconstruct the original intention as far as possible. To use Sperber and Wilson’s terminology, we use a set of “implicatures” which Boase-Beier (2004) locates in the style of the text since from this we can determine the choices and attitude of the author. This can be related to the distinction made by Gutt (2000) between indirect and direct translation which can be likened to indirect and direct quotation. In this case, literary translation is seen as an instance of direct translation since the style of what has been written needs to be conveyed rather than the form.

In fact, looking back to last semester’s module ‘Stylistics for Translators’, I can’t help but think that the knowledge I now possess of translation theory would have helped considerably with my essay on the importance of the translation of style in a German text called Simultan by Ingeborg Bachmann (translated as Word for Word by Mary Fran Gilbert). During this essay I claimed that in this particular text, “the style is arguably of greater importance than the meaning and content of the narrative.” A better understanding of Relevance Theory and other concepts related to Cognitive Stylistics such as mind style would certainly have facilitated my analysis and understanding of that text and its translation, whilst simultaneously strengthening my argument!

I suppose what I am trying to say is that theory can be considered as relevant in terms of reading texts before and after translation. Knowledge of Relevance Theory, for example, can help us develop particular strategies for the translation of a text, ensuring that the assumed intention of the original author is conveyed as far as possible in the target text. On the other hand, it can also enable us to understand why a text has been translated in a particular way. I think that, although my aim is to work as a practicing translator, I fully understand the importance of gaining this grounding in translation theory and I am grateful for it. As Mary Midgley (2001) said, theories are “pairs of spectacles through which to see the world differently.” And with a bit of luck, our future translations will similarly enable others to see the world in a different way.

Fiona Hayter translates from German, French and Spanish into English. She is currently studying the MA in Literary Translation at UEA where she has also just completed an internship at the British Centre for Literary Translation. You can contact her at F.Hayter@uea.ac.uk.

Translation theory

As a practitioner of translation I have for a few years now had problems with trying to understand why translation theory (and by extension translation studies) actually exists. I came out of my undergraduate degree with a persistent and lingering thought: Does theory really aid us in translation? My initial reaction to the theories presented was one of confusion: was I being stupid or were all the theories not just saying the same thing? The answer to me was rather simplistic and there are two paths down which one may walk indicating a choice: we either translate to a paraphrase or metaphrase model. However it turned out to be a little more interesting...

Theories today tend to be descriptive observations of what has already occurred in translation; they detail how people have translated specific texts. This is a historical shift from the days of the prescriptive stance in translation and the arduous task of remaining ‘faithful’ to a text by following syntax and word order. We now know this to be a rather stilted notion, hence the move towards descriptive models which have allowed us - as translators - a more liberal approach (within reason) i.e. content over form. However, because theory now tends to be descriptive, we can only derive strategies from these observations, strategies which can aid us when looking at specific works in literary canon (which is another debate in itself) and may aid us when translating something similar in style or which perhaps alludes to texts which have preceded it; an echo of previous literary works if you will.
These may guide us to mishaps in translation and may alert us to tread with caution but they do not actually teach us how to translate. Although this would arguably be an impossible task, especially in literary translation (each text is unique even if it resembles another and therefore requires an individual approach), the problem remains that translation is a wholly individualistic task and quite simply we all work in different ways so a theory cannot be tailored to everyone and their respective needs.

Some modern theorists are now more concerned with cognitive stylistics and detecting authorial intent: in essence we must ascertain the meaning behind the lexical choice and in Alexander Pope’s words capture the fire of the text. This is common sense to translators but when one is plodding one’s way through a translation there is a tendency to lose ourselves in what is written, not what is being said. Theories, or rather notions in this case, can help us to remain permanently focused on reading between the lines. We are not only translators but also readers, and as such can easily be influenced by our own interpretations of what is going on in a literary text.

As a reader we already carry out the necessary and obvious tasks of reading, analysing and decrypting in order for us to proceed with translation. If a piece is feminist in genre or style, then it must be translated as a feminist piece: anything else would be a corruption of the source text. This is where Vermeer’s Skopos theory comes to the aid of us functionalists who have a rather pragmatic approach to translation. Our ultimate mission is to translate according to a specific aim or goal i.e. purposeful transaction; therefore, in literary terms, we are to translate and basically remain ‘faithful’ to the text’s content due to certain criteria imposed upon translator and/or commission (one notable exception is translated drama texts where more scope for adaptation is permissible). These restrictions notwithstanding, any deviation of style in reality would mean that the purpose of the target text differs from that of the source text, which has either been misunderstood or intentionally corrupted. It is that fire of which Pope speaks which requires not just attention but also retention.

Having said all this, there has been one snippet of theory which has caught my attention and it may belong more to the domain of linguistics: nevertheless it has struck a chord, the reverberations of which will not escape my mind. Walter Benjamin posited the notion of ‘pure language’, a language which is operating behind all others (think of a computer program ‘running in background’ when several other programs are simultaneously being used). We seek to decrypt, translate and (re)encrypt for the target audience, then disseminate the message, passing on the story from one person or culture to another, ensuring that the message is harmoniously and simultaneously broadcast to disparate cultures in their respective living languages and resisting the notion that certain things are untranslatable whilst embracing the fact that everything is comprehensible across cultures. I liken it to music or the look on somebody’s face: although there are innumerable instruments with which to create music and endless melodies, beats, notes, tempos and genres, the mere fact that everybody can enjoy and find pleasure in it, whether it be foreign or not, has provided me with the conclusion that we all fundamentally understand one another on some intangible yet higher and some may say telepathic level. And the look on somebody’s face? Well, a smile means the same thing in every culture, right?

Adam Kirkpatrick translates from French and Swedish into English and is currently studying towards the MA in Literary Translation at the UEA. He is particularly interested in Fantasy Fiction, Historical texts and the work of J.M.G Le Clézio.