The Value of Differences: Jennifer Lindsay on Noticing Translation

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essays/the-value-of-differences

by Thevet • 1 year ago

31 26 1 year ago

jbjbjbjb3• 1 year ago

My layman take on this is I don’t really want to read a book where “There isn't a paragraph or turn of phrase which feels like it didn't originate in English”. I want the original language to punch through a bit and be celebrated especially with idioms.

kevingadd3• 1 year ago

Don't you want to appreciate the book at its best, as it was appreciated by readers who read it in its original language? Why demand a compromised work? If you want to soak up untranslated idioms, you can just learn another language.

readthenotes12• 1 year ago

"just learn another language."

Lol Just learn many other languages and cultural idioms that are sometimes regional and dense with meaning?

PaulDavisThe1st2• 1 year ago

fun fact: Gabriel Garcia Marquez said in public that he believed the english translation of "100 anos de soledad" was better than his spanish original.

j7ake• 1 year ago

Sorry but translated works do not mean compromised work. Don’t disrespect translators like that.

Second, Learning a language is not a binary variable. It takes decades to master a language.

Finally, Your ability to appreciate a book is both a function of the text and your ability to comprehend the text. A translated book will give you better experience than the book in a language you are unfamiliar with.

jbjbjbjb3• 1 year ago

Well if I really wanted to appreciate the book at its best I’d learn the language and read the original. But that has its obvious impracticalities.

I think it’s a trade off then. I’d prefer authenticity, richness and nuance over accessibility. It is just preference. Did you prefer the modern accessible versions of Shakespeare or the originals in their Elizabethan glory?

PaulDavisThe1st2• 1 year ago

fun experience: I've read two english translations of The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. The first one honored the general vibe of its Germanic ancestor, and made it extremely hard to read. The second one had its own vibe, not uniquely English nor obviously German, and was a masterpiece.

NoTeslaThrow2• 1 year ago

I'm not even sure what this means for a language to punch through in a way the author or reader might find desirable. Do you have an example?

giraffe_lady• 1 year ago

I'm not the original commenter but I think some of the personal epithets in homer just smack you with your distance from the original. "White armed andromache," "mouse god apollo", "ox-eyed hera" and of course the famous polytropos odysseus etc.

These have as much to do with ancient greek culture and maybe mindset as language per se. But even still, the choice is to elide them or let them be strange. There's no real way to carry the meaning through to english without it being striking, calling attention to the original.

makeitdouble2• 1 year ago

We see this a lot in the manga/anime communities. Readers usually get used to the Japanese honorifics, name suffixes etc. and have a pretty good understanding of them.

An adaptator getting rid of them to have more natural English will come up with way worse phrasing, while losing a lot of the nuance and meaning of the original text.

In a way, the reader undertands that it all happens in a non-English country, so getting unnatural English phrasing isn't much of an issue.

bigstrat2003• 1 year ago

That, and I want the translated work to reflect the original vision of the author as much as possible. I don't want cultural references changed for my country, nor do I want things changed because my country might find them offensive when the original audience didn't. In my opinion, the best compliment you can give a translation is to say that it fades into the background and lets the original shine through.

retrac• 1 year ago

But what is the original vision of the author? It may not be possible to fully to fully capture without compromise.

For example, many people in this thread are insistent they want a "phrase by phrase" translation. But what if the author wrote the book in a colloquial spoken style, that is specifically supposed to come across as neutral contemporary language? If you translate the work into English in a stilted style that carefully preserves the structure of the original even when it produces unnaturalistic English, you have lost a key aspect of the original vision of the work. It won't hit the reader the same way.

lubujackson• 1 year ago

Strongly disagree. Translation is like taking a 3D object and trying to convey it in 2D. You can be overly descriptive and accurate but lose all sense of flow. You can try to capture the flow of things but then lose the precision of meaning. Or you can approximate both to make the translation as strong as possible on both front, then get slammed from both sides.

Sometimes translators can highlight a less considered aspect of the work, like when you hear a great cover song that makes you appreciate the original that much more.

I understand the ideal of the perfectly translated thing, by definitionally it can't exist. I suggest going to a library and read the first page of 5+ translations (let's say, Don Quixote) and you will have a pretty clear sense of what the original text must have conveyed as well as several conflicting voices, some of which you will hate and others you may even appreciate. But you can never hear the original through a translation so it might as well be one that is interesting in its own right.

watwut• 1 year ago

If original vision involved the language in which the book is written to be natural to natives, then weird turn of phrase in the translation is not accurate. It does not let the original shine, it makes the original appear odd.

nestorD• 1 year ago

As a French speaker who has done quite a bit of paid translating between French and English (so an uneducated translator rather than an amateur one I guess...), I have found that a lot of translation (in non-fiction, but also sometimes in fiction) have a feel to them. You might not care or notice at a glance, but the text does feel unmistakably translated. That is a constant reminder of that fact that translation is a job that takes real skill, not just knowledge of both language.

jillesvangurp• 1 year ago

AI translations are getting really usable lately. I'm using it a lot for legal translations between German and English. This went from barely usable ten years ago to basically flawless today. I also use it to localize our company website in German (from English). I've had some native speakers double check my work and while there are occasional mistakes that need fixing, it's basically good enough that I trust it enough at this point to publish and then fix things on an incidental basis rather than getting a manual review first. Just faster and easier. We've had zero comments on this from our German speaking audience. They don't seem to be aware.

I recently added French for some of our pages as we were getting some inbound from France. You still need to be careful but mostly it does the job. And I get a kick out of seeing my writing translated into what looks (to me) pretty elegant French. I have some dormant memories of high school French. Enough to appreciate it. I generally just use OpenAI's o4 model currently. I might experiment with 4.5 to see if it does a better/different job. I generally just paste markdown and let it translate the whole thing with the instruction to preserve the structure. Works well enough.

I'm guessing there are going to be a lot of AI assisted book translations in the near future. I appreciate that they might not be amazing but they are probably getting good enough. And increased context sizes and improved instruction following should also make it easier for translators to stay on top of and direct/oversee the quality; e.g. fine-tuning certain wording and stylistic touches.

Probably a bigger factor here is original authors gate-keeping quality here. They wouldn't necessarily want a low quality translation misrepresenting their work. However, I would expect that especially authors targeting relatively minor languages might have an incentive to self-publish their work in other languages targeting larger audiences (English, Spanish, etc.) and that a few successes with this might make them more confident. If you did the hard work writing the book and it's moderately successful, why not increase the potential audience by 10-20x? Of course publishers might pick up on this faster than starving authors.

And the standards for self publishing on e.g. Amazon are pretty low. Probably a lot of AI generated garbage there to begin with.

makeitdouble2• 1 year ago

This is very close to the traditional discussion of translation vs adaptation[0].

Perhaps there is a larger prejudice here against scrutiny of translation as overly academic, an exercise in smug pedantry hampering creative freedom

Yes. And while the discussion is about literary work, I think this is an extension of the stance people have toward translation in general.

We see that with product designers demoing AI translation as "transparent", and something that allows users to not have to care about the language barriers anymore.

While being able to roughly understand foreign contents is better than nothing, too many people IMHO are assuming that auto-translation is good enough. It seldom is, and will probably never be if we care even a little about what people are really trying to say. You can survive with translation, but the bare minimum shouldn't be the end goal, or at it we should keep in mind the missing parts.

[0] https://acculing.com/difference-between-translation-and-adap...

neom• 1 year ago

This made me think a lot about Sharon Choi, so I'm sure must be just insanely talented. https://www.washingtonpost.com/gender-identity/you-probably-...

The Value of Differences: Jennifer Lindsay on Noticing Translation

Related Stories