What is the creative aspect of literary translation?



Asked on

6 Answers | Add Yours

accessteacher's profile pic

Posted on (Answer #1)

When you think about it, if you are translating a classic work of literature from one language into another, you necessarily have to be creative in how you complete this task. This is because langauges are not the same in terms of the meaning one word can have and the different expressions you can create with that word. Every word in every language can convey a very different idea or series of associations in that language to its audience. The challenge of translating is to try and capture such subtle nuances in the original langauge and convey them in a different language in the translation.

Take Spanish for example. Spanish has a tense called the subjunctive that we do not have any more in English, and is used to express a vague hypothetical future that is not fully realised as yet. The Spanish language can be thus used to express concisely and succinctly possible hypothetical worlds which would take lots of words of explanation in English. The challenge of literary translation is to be able to translate such meanings and associations whilst remaining true to the original work and not getting bogged down in endless footnotes and explanations of what was meant by one particular word. Creativity is essential.

user6171003's profile pic

Posted on (Answer #2)

1)One of the major issues among those who discuss the state of literary translation today is that translators are under-recognized by publishers, who, for example, will intentionally not list the translator’s name on the book jacket to try to hide the fact that a work is translated. Publishers do this because they perceive that a work’s status as a translation will discourage readers and so hurt sales of the book. This problem is probably overstated by publishers and does not address the consequent problem of the additional costs of publishing translated work. Nonetheless, one unfortunate effect of such practices is that readers know little and understand even less about the art of translation.

2)If even the translators’ art is not recognized among readers, how much more hidden is the process of translation editing? Of course in some ways a successful editor strives for anonymity, as does a successful translator—you do not want the work to read “like a translation”—but even people within the publishing industry often misunderstand the role editors play in the publishing process. Even translators do not always understand this role. As a result, there remain in the literary community a number of assumptions and misunderstandings that work against best translation practices.

To what extent should a translation be edited?

*A misconception that is harmful to translated works is that the editor of such works should only edit and improve the quality of the translation, not the quality of the book.

*That is, the act of translation often seems to “canonize” a book as it appeared in its original language. This is something rarely discussed but, I think, widely felt by editors. The types of editorial decisions that are made every day for works written in English—to rework a weak piece of dialog, for example—become unthinkable with translations, simply by virtue of the fact that the book, having already been published in one language, is perceived as being “done.”

*This is particularly problematic when, as often happens, the book was not edited well in its original language, and will contain obvious logistical problems: someone walks out of a room and then, in the next scene, is still standing in it—or of course any number of less obvious problems that nonetheless work against the book’s succeeding at what it is trying to do.

*We should think of the editor of a translated work as playing two editorial roles: editor of the translation and editor of the book. There is no reason why a book should not be edited simply because it has already appeared in another form (language), if the original form is flawed, and assuming that the editor is proceeding responsibly. Our experience at Dalkey Archive Press is that foreign writers are most often thankful that problems in their work are being caught and addressed, and are happy to work with us on improvements.


user6171003's profile pic

Posted on (Answer #3)

What is the goal of the translation?

A)Making the best book possible, a book that evokes the spirit and particular energy of the original, has to take precedence over making a book faithful (literal, word for word) to the original.

B)Translators sometimes worry that steering from a literal word for word translation will “corrupt” the original text. The fact is that a work in translation has already been corrupted by the act of translation itself. The new work, the translated work, is always already an interpretation of the original—unavoidably so.

So the question should rather be: what sort of interpretation conveys the experience of the original, it’s particular stylistic energy, most accurately? The translation should not preserve literal words and phrases for preservation’s sake. To treat a translated book in this way is to treat it more as a museum piece than as a vibrant literary work.

C)Another issue is the extra time and resources needed to edit a translated book well. Although low sales is usually cited as the reason why English-language publishing houses publish so few translated works, high costs are also an obstacle. This is one important sense in which the process of editing is not well understood—the hidden costs associated with it.

Does the editor of a translated work need to know the language of the original work?

At Dalkey Archive we publish books from over 30 countries. If we could only publish books from languages someone on our editorial staff knows, the number would be perhaps half as many.

But this is not even the key issue. The issue again is what must a translation achieve? Do we prioritize word-for-word accuracy with the original, or do we say that what is more important is that the spirit and the particular energy of the original be conveyed, rather than just the words.

An editor need not be an expert in the original language because the editor’s primary concern must always be toward the quality of the work in English, that it creates for an English-language reader an experience approximate to the experience the book’s original readers had. An editor needs to know English, and needs to know how to edit. There are far more people who have competence in a foreign language than there are people who know how to edit a book well, yet when it comes to making a book the best book it can be, skill in editing—in other words, skill with the English language—is by far the more important attribute. The editor first and foremost must be a reader of English, and a person for whom the translation must read, in English, like an original work—which in many senses it is.


user6171003's profile pic

Posted on (Answer #4)

Why translations fall flat

In fact Queneau’s work offers an excellent example of many of the potential pitfalls into which a literary translation can fall. I’ll list a few of the literary qualities Queneau is known for that make his work such dangerous material for translation:

1. Puns/wordplay, jokes. Humor is incredibly subtle and often culture-specific, while plays on words are obviously specific to their original language. An equivalent has to be found in the new language and sometimes these simply don’t work or need to be cut, or a completely different play on words has to be invented to retain the liveliness of play. In such cases, the translator and editor might have to decide which is more important to the passage, the literal sense of the phrase or the playfulness that it brings to bear.

2. Slang & colloquialism. Probably the most important issue with slang is timeliness—will the approximate slang chosen by the translator remain relatively current? With some translations you can almost identify the year, if not the month, in which it must have been translated. Another issue is appropriateness to the situation in the book, and here the problem is often that a translator will “clean up” the foul language in the original, often without even realizing, simply because he or she is not comfortable using such foul language, even though the original writer was. This happens more often than one would expect, and translators tend to realize it only after an editor has pointed it out.

3. Translating a baroque style. How do you make the translation sound baroque rather than just awkward and clumsy? This is typically a systematic problem, and the translator of such a work has to be extraordinarily creative and resourceful, or else should not attempt the translation.

4. Purposeful awkwardness in the original that simply does not work in the new language, that falls flat. You can try to convey the sense of awkwardness in other ways—by subtly referring to it, for instance, or moving direct dialog into indirect, etc.—although sometimes you simply have to leave the passage out. In leaving it out, you lose something, but then in any translation you always lose something. The important thing is that the translation not call attention to itself in a way that will destroy the reader’s experience of the book.

5. Cultural, historical, and geographical references. If references are not obscure or difficult for the original audience, they should not be obscure or difficult for the new audience. Of course there are real limits to the extent to which it is possible to make such references familiar, but certain simple tricks can contextualize for the reader without damaging the reader’s experience of the book. For example, you can add an inconspicuous explanatory phrase, or mention that So-and-so is a “town,” or add the word “Avenue” where it was left out of the original. Here as elsewhere the translation editor has to assume the position of the reader, and should consider the overall experience of reading the original and how best to approximate that experience for readers in English.

user6171003's profile pic

Posted on (Answer #5)

literary translation implies the translation of all genres of literature, which include prose, drama and poetry. Johnson (1999:1) describes literature as 'an apparently nebulous body of knowledge in oral or written form, an imitation of life, which reflects civilization and culture, and which covers every angle of human activities-culture, tradition, entertainment, information among others.' It is one of the great creative and universal means of communicating the emotional, spiritual and intellectual concerns of humankind.

Literary translation has to do with translating texts written in a literary language, which abounds in ambiguities, homonyms and arbitrariness, as distinct from the language of science or that of administration. Literary language is highly connotative and subjective because each literary author is lexically and stylistically idiosyncratic and through his power of imagination, he uses certain literary techniques such as figures of speech, proverbs and homonyms through which he weaves literary forms.

The literary translator is therefore the person who concerns himself with translation of literary texts. A literary translator, according to Peter Newmark (1988:1) generally respects good writing by taking into account the language, structures, and content, whatever the nature of the text. The literary translator participates in the author's creative activity and then recreates structures and signs by adapting the target language text to the source language text as closely as intelligibility allows. He needs to assess not only the literary quality of the text but also its acceptability to the target reader, and this should be done by having a deep knowledge of the cultural and literary history of both the Source and the Target Languages.

Literary translation may be said to have the greatest number of peculiar problems. Problems in literary translation largely depend on who is translating and what he knows.

The problems of literary translation include cultural, linguistic, psychological, deceptive cognates, equivalence, and style.


user6171003's profile pic

Posted on (Answer #6)

Language and culture are closely related and one is indispensable to the other. In fact, language acquires its meaning from the country's culture. A single language may cross several culture borders. For instance, English and French are Indo-European languages but belong to different cultures. There are generally problems in the translation of cultural words in a literary text unless there is a cultural overlap between the source language and the target language. It is not enough for a translator to know what words are used in the target language; he must also make the reader understand the sense as it is understood by the reader of the original. For instance, in a text where there is a cultural focus, there can be translation problems due to the cultural gap between the source and the target languages.

The meaning of a single word or expression is largely derived from its culture. Therefore, translation, being a simple linguistic process, a cultural understanding comes into play because the translator is supposed to produce equivalence and where this does not exist, problems occur. Okolie (2000:208) affirms that:

"Most of African literature is a rendering of 'living manners'...If translated by someone who is not conversant with or close to the culture and the specifics that make it alive, then the translation resulting horn such a text fails to communicate the spirit of the culture producing a sterile, literal translation, which does not re-create or reproduce the people."

The translator is expected to creatively exploit the altered cultural, linguistic and literary context in order to realize the different potentials of the target language in an act or literary creation since translation is an intercultural activity.

Linguistically, each language has its own metaphysics, which determines the spirit of a nation and its behavioral norms, and this is what is known as linguistic relativity or the Whorfian hypothesis. Benamjn Lee Whorl, quoted by Penn ( 977:2 17) believes that 'the background linguistic system (...) of each language is itself the shaper of ideas....' This means that language directs our intellect and even our sensory perception. Since words or images may vary considerably from one group to another, the translator needs to pay attention to the style, language and vocabulary peculiar to the two languages in question in order to produce an 'exact' translation of the source language text.

The literary translator also faces the problem of style. Style is not an easy term to define, however, it can readily be said that style is how one says a thing. In other words, style is the way in which something is written or said, as distinct from its subject matter. Naturally, each language poses its own problems of style, but the practical considerations that go into the making of translation do not seem to differ much from one translator to another.

We’ve answered 396,050 questions. We can answer yours, too.

Ask a question