A literary review recently published in The Hindu raises some interesting questions of translation in considering a collection of short stories translated into English. It questions whether the fury of the characters in some of the tales is effectively communicated or whether the emotion is somehow distorted by the process of translating.
The review also asks whether people have developed an ability to read translations in a different mindset from original works: "Can we conclude that down the years an outlook on translations has developed among us, which leaves us unaffected by the incomplete harnessing of English to native thought? Have we, in other words, evolved a technique of reading translations?" The reviewer seems to think that although the general mood of the stories remains intact, English is incapable of recapturing the tone of the original vernacular, but he still ponders whether readers can infer much of the original tone from their own preconceptions of society.
This article made me think of a passage I once read in a book about writing. The passage said that when language is translated it loses its poetry. While two words or phrases may have the same denotations in two different languages, their connotations are invariably different. Because of this, a translation can never fully represent the thoughts and emotions of the original text.
I Googled "difficulties in translation" to try to get a general idea of what the most common difficulties are. In general, the Google hits reflected the ideas expressed in the literary review. "Translation is never an easy task, but it becomes particularly difficult when there are very strong human emotions and traditions involved." (http://lobeckta.tripod.com/carnavaldebinche/id7.html) Someone reading a work outside of that work's original cultural context cannot possibly understand the full extent of the emotions in that work. Yet, I, like the writer of the review, wonder whether--if the reader understands the original cultural context--that reader can still infer the original emotion, even from a translation.
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2 comments:
I liked your post and my questions relate to interpretations of English texts based on different times in history. When one reads a book written 100 years ago, are they able to get the full feeling of what the author intended at that time? When one reads the bible, for example, do we determine what is "important" based on the currently pressing issues - ex: during the civil rights movement, priests were quoting the bible saying slavery was right. If we can't even maintain similar meaning within our own language, how can we possibly consider the issue within another language?
I am so glad you wrote about this! The things that get "lost in translation" are something I think about (and complain about) all of the time. I feel that you can really only gain the emotional connection with a word in another language when you know the language-translation is not enough. I have talked about this in class but when I share songs in Spanish with non Spanish-speaking people, I hate translating them because translation does not do the songs justice. It is incredibly frustrating because so much is lost. You make me question whether or not my interepretation of Spanish is even sufficient; perhaps the influences of English as my first language even interferes with me fully comprehending the Spanish version of the word.
As for Travis' question, I think that reading books later in history definitely causes interpretation flaws. I think that language definitely can cause this problem (as we all know the difficulties of Shakespeare-and that was English!). I think of all of the books I have read in translation- Les Mis, the Odyssey, Symposium, Nietzsche (there are definitely parts there that can't be fully translated/expressed), etc. Are we getting gypped by reading in translation?
I think that cultural changes also influence the way we interpret literature. For example, we often tend to judge books written in different time periods and cultures by our modern day standards and morals. We read a book called "Things Fall Apart" last year in English, and we had to decide if the main character was a good or bad man. This was extremely difficult to do because his culture that influenced him and the morals of his society were so much different than ours were.
So I think that language and culture can definitely interfere with interpreting books. And I totally agree that when translation is not just a simple "book=libro" and involves emotional ties, the personality of the word can be lost when translated.
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