Translators, particularly those who work with pop culture exports, are often undervalued for their efforts, despite the significant amount of mental labor required in their role. In a globally...
Translators, particularly those who work with pop culture exports, are often undervalued for their efforts, despite the significant amount of mental labor required in their role. In a globally connected world, these individuals should be valued more highly as they make cultural exports available to millions of people to whom works would otherwise remain inaccessible.
You can just submit links with gift codes. They used to get filtered out, but that was changed a while ago to accommodate them. So I have edited the link to include the gift coded (unless you...
You can just submit links with gift codes. They used to get filtered out, but that was changed a while ago to accommodate them. So I have edited the link to include the gift coded (unless you would prefer it reamin only in the comments? in which case I can undo it).
p.s. Any particular reason you posted this to ~arts instead of the new ~humanities.language? I can move it there if you would like.
Oh, apologies. It can stay as it is. In fact, you can remove the comment you replied to if you'd like and we can both pretend this never happened. 😊 No particular reason other than the fact that...
You can just submit links with gift codes.
Oh, apologies. It can stay as it is. In fact, you can remove the comment you replied to if you'd like and we can both pretend this never happened. 😊
Any particular reason you posted this to ~arts instead of the new ~humanities.language? I can move it there if you would like.
No particular reason other than the fact that I'm not yet used to the new channels. I also have the ill-considered tendency to discard literature as part of humanities in general, so I thought ~arts would be a more appropriate channel but ~humanities.languages is pretty spot on.
Really interesting article. It's not so often that you get a look behind the scenes of a translator's work. She's good, too. The second example especially is hard to translate ("alegrÃa"), and she...
Really interesting article. It's not so often that you get a look behind the scenes of a translator's work. She's good, too. The second example especially is hard to translate ("alegrÃa"), and she found an elegant solution.
The funny thing to me about translation is you can't make an exact copy of the original. There will pretty much always be some part that's different somehow. Like how she went with "honest to God" instead of "by all that's holy." It works fine in Spanish, but it would be over the top in English and make the character less believable.
Or another example. I'm reading Letters back to Ancient China right now. It's about a Chinese mandarin who time travels, but ends up in a different place than he expected. The English translation has this sentence:
It seems that only our special time-travel-paper can survive the journey of a thousand years.
Instead of "survive," the German original has a word that would literally translate as "to rush through, to hurry through." The idea is that the paper travels through a thousand years, and it only takes a moment. You have to choose: do you go with a more literal translation, or do you capture the style and feel of the original, and give up the detail that the journey happens fast? The translator made the right choice. You hear the same voice and get the same feeling in both languages.
That was a very interesting article, thank you (and I really like how it was coded). I do amateur translations of medieval/Renaissance fencing manuscripts and the topic of literal translation...
That was a very interesting article, thank you (and I really like how it was coded). I do amateur translations of medieval/Renaissance fencing manuscripts and the topic of literal translation comes up sometimes within that community. It's definitely an impressive skill to be able to interpret an author's intent and voice and make it work in English.
i am not native english speaker. i will never forget how one of my books (old english songs) had the introduction from the translator where he wrote that he not TRANSLATED the book, but REPLAYED...
i am not native english speaker. i will never forget how one of my books (old english songs) had the introduction from the translator where he wrote that he not TRANSLATED the book, but REPLAYED it, because literal translate would not make sense. for example the original book had a poem, something like "the egg rhymes with the leg", in my language the word for an egg does not rhyme with the leg at all, so for each song the translator pretty much reinvented everything while trying to save the main idea. i think for the artistic translation it is very important
I love looking at languages from a translation perspective. I notice that sometimes phrases translated into English just seem inadequate, even if I try to come up with something faithful to the...
I love looking at languages from a translation perspective. I notice that sometimes phrases translated into English just seem inadequate, even if I try to come up with something faithful to the intent, if not the literal meaning.
For example, this line from a song:
Y'a des moments tellement beau y'a que le silence pour le dire.
Translates to:
There are moments so beautiful that they can only be spoken about with silence.
This is a pretty clunky phrasing, and the fluidity of French prosody really highlights the difference. I think altering the phrase too much, though, would just ruin it altogether. It feels like the best approach to understanding it would be to just learn French. (Kind of like Sublime suggested in the liner notes to the song "Caress Me Down" where they rendered the lyrics of the Spanish verse as simply "Learn Spanish".) I wish I could just snap my fingers and natively understand every language so I could experience and appreciate them directly without having to rely on someone else to lossily render it in a form I can comprehend.
For anyone else who finds this subject fascinating, I'd like to recommend Douglas Hofstadter's book Le Ton beau de Marot. It is a wonderful examination of the nature of language and consciousness through the art of translation.
Translators, particularly those who work with pop culture exports, are often undervalued for their efforts, despite the significant amount of mental labor required in their role. In a globally connected world, these individuals should be valued more highly as they make cultural exports available to millions of people to whom works would otherwise remain inaccessible.
Gifted link.
You can just submit links with gift codes. They used to get filtered out, but that was changed a while ago to accommodate them. So I have edited the link to include the gift coded (unless you would prefer it reamin only in the comments? in which case I can undo it).
p.s. Any particular reason you posted this to ~arts instead of the new ~humanities.language? I can move it there if you would like.
Oh, apologies. It can stay as it is. In fact, you can remove the comment you replied to if you'd like and we can both pretend this never happened. 😊
No particular reason other than the fact that I'm not yet used to the new channels. I also have the ill-considered tendency to discard literature as part of humanities in general, so I thought ~arts would be a more appropriate channel but ~humanities.languages is pretty spot on.
This question is now moot. While you were asking permission, @mycketforvirrad went ahead and did it.
Really interesting article. It's not so often that you get a look behind the scenes of a translator's work. She's good, too. The second example especially is hard to translate ("alegrÃa"), and she found an elegant solution.
The funny thing to me about translation is you can't make an exact copy of the original. There will pretty much always be some part that's different somehow. Like how she went with "honest to God" instead of "by all that's holy." It works fine in Spanish, but it would be over the top in English and make the character less believable.
Or another example. I'm reading Letters back to Ancient China right now. It's about a Chinese mandarin who time travels, but ends up in a different place than he expected. The English translation has this sentence:
Instead of "survive," the German original has a word that would literally translate as "to rush through, to hurry through." The idea is that the paper travels through a thousand years, and it only takes a moment. You have to choose: do you go with a more literal translation, or do you capture the style and feel of the original, and give up the detail that the journey happens fast? The translator made the right choice. You hear the same voice and get the same feeling in both languages.
That was a very interesting article, thank you (and I really like how it was coded). I do amateur translations of medieval/Renaissance fencing manuscripts and the topic of literal translation comes up sometimes within that community. It's definitely an impressive skill to be able to interpret an author's intent and voice and make it work in English.
i am not native english speaker. i will never forget how one of my books (old english songs) had the introduction from the translator where he wrote that he not TRANSLATED the book, but REPLAYED it, because literal translate would not make sense. for example the original book had a poem, something like "the egg rhymes with the leg", in my language the word for an egg does not rhyme with the leg at all, so for each song the translator pretty much reinvented everything while trying to save the main idea. i think for the artistic translation it is very important
I love looking at languages from a translation perspective. I notice that sometimes phrases translated into English just seem inadequate, even if I try to come up with something faithful to the intent, if not the literal meaning.
For example, this line from a song:
Y'a des moments tellement beau y'a que le silence pour le dire.
Translates to:
There are moments so beautiful that they can only be spoken about with silence.
This is a pretty clunky phrasing, and the fluidity of French prosody really highlights the difference. I think altering the phrase too much, though, would just ruin it altogether. It feels like the best approach to understanding it would be to just learn French. (Kind of like Sublime suggested in the liner notes to the song "Caress Me Down" where they rendered the lyrics of the Spanish verse as simply "Learn Spanish".) I wish I could just snap my fingers and natively understand every language so I could experience and appreciate them directly without having to rely on someone else to lossily render it in a form I can comprehend.
For anyone else who finds this subject fascinating, I'd like to recommend Douglas Hofstadter's book Le Ton beau de Marot. It is a wonderful examination of the nature of language and consciousness through the art of translation.