Translation: A Guide to the Practice of Crafting Target Texts

Stella Cragie, Ann Pattison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000747355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

This practical guide by two experienced translators and translation tutors explores aspects of time, context and culture in a range of translated literary texts, including novels, memoirs, poems and plays. Reflective analytical sections are complemented by a variety of practical tasks that reflect the book's craft-based approach. Providing a dual focus on both analysis and creativity, this volume helps readers to develop two different skill sets required for translation: deconstruction and reconstruction.

To learn how to analyse or deconstruct a source text (ST), the tasks include translating and editing, comparison and analysis of source language (SL) texts and translations, and critiquing or improving target language (TL) texts produced by translators from different times. A range of creative writing challenges reveal the secrets writers use to hook their readers. Whatever language readers translate into, these insights will help them to find their own writer's voice, making them better equipped to recreate another author's voice, whatever the time or cultural context.

This is the essential guide to improving target texts for all translators and students of translation.

CHAPTER 1
Groundworks

The book’s orientation is both writer-centred and translator-centred, since our objective is to examine literary and semi-literary texts and translations with a translator’s critical eye and a writer’s well-toned creative muscle (the word muscle is a deliberate choice because writers have to hone their skills with a regular workout in the same way as runners have to perform a whole sequence of warm-up exercises before they take part in a race).

Both writer and translator need to be aware of how the language they are using relates to the time and cultural context in which the text is set. Therefore, particular attention is given to language change, variations in language that are dependent on social context, the various aspects of meaning and inter-cultural communication.

Many writers over the centuries were able to improve their craft by studying translations of the classics and even attempting to produce a new translation of their own. In the history of European literature, there are a number of examples of such writer-translators, ranging from the Roman orator Quintilian to the modern-day poet Seamus Heaney or the author Michael Frayn, via Mallarmé, Voltaire and even Montesquieu, who feared that translation could have a negative effect on a writer’s creativity (Ann Pattison Painting with Words, in Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on Creative Writing and Translation Studies, edited by Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella, 2006, Continuum: London).

The legacy of world literature in translation and the controversy surrounding old and new translations of seminal works, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, have provided us with a wealth of material to demonstrate how both the time of writing and the cultural environment prevalent at the time of translation, in addition to the timeframes used in the work, can affect not only the translation strategy and approach but also the way a particular work is received.

To facilitate the process of deconstruction, we use analysis and comparison based on interactions between the perspectives of time, context and culture: imagine a triangle with time at the top and context and culture at the bottom. The triangle symbolises the interaction of these perspectives. In broad terms, Time explores WHEN; Context looks at WHAT, WHERE and WHO; Culture involves the values and viewpoints of the stakeholders (i.e., the author/narrator, characters/actors and translator/s).

Understanding these perspectives is central to analysis of a literary or semi-literary work (a poem, a play, a novel, a memoir or a piece of scholarly writing).

DEFINITIONS

Time takes pride of place in the trio of perspectives because it acts as a benchmark or regulator of the plot/theme of the work, by creating a sequence of time-frames to enable the plot/theme to develop. The diversity of timeframes in fiction, for instance, generates a complex web of interaction and flow, which may be linear, circular, forward, backward or any combination of these dynamics. In modern and contemporary literature, the importance of time factors has grown significantly, hand in hand with the development of visual media (films or televised works in particular). In novels written in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the author’s creative effort and skills generally tended to develop the action through a chronological sequence of scenes; readers progressed through these scenes, imagining the events, and the only concrete visual stimuli were probably book illustrations. The theatre and opera, however, were already combining words (and music) into more “realistic” and direct forms of visual representation, with actors and singers performing on stage, in costume and with scenery, thus providing the audience with visual stimuli. Some modern and contemporary fiction (for example, thrillers) appears particularly “visually driven” in its filmic manipulation and sequencing of timeframes. For example, the thrillers written by Eric Ambler in the late 1930s may be “semi-consciously written as film scripts…. Ambler was directly involved in the cinema, and crafted his books directly in terms of their filmability” (a comment by Norman Stone from the Introduction to Ambler’s Journey into Fear, published in 1940 and made into a film produced by Orson Welles in 1942).

But time is not limited to the timeframes expressed in the work itself; there are time factors that are external to the work, such as the moment in time when it was written, published and translated (where applicable), as well as less definable time factors (such as reading).

The stories recounted in the Icelandic sagas, for instance, mostly took place in Iceland in the ninth, tenth and early eleventh centuries and were based on historical events. They were part of an oral tradition that helped to forge Iceland’s national identity, but it was not until the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries that they were recorded in written form. It was even later, in the eighteenth century, that translations from Old Norse into European languages began to appear. (Source: Oscar Wergeland Guide to the classics: the Icelandic saga 14.08.2016 http://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-the-icelandic-saga-63112).

The anonymous mediaeval German love poem that appears below is believed to have been written in the late twelfth century, but the vow of undying love that it expresses is of course timeless. Even so, recreating these sentiments remains a challenge for the translator nine centuries later!

Dû bist mîn, ich bin dîn.

des solt dû gewis sîn.

dû bist beslozzen

in mînem herzen,

verlorn ist das sluzzelîn:

dû muost ouch immêr darinne sîn.

For those who are not familiar with mediaeval German, a literal and semantic rendering of the original poem would be:

You are mine, I am thine,

You can be sure of that.

You are locked away

In my heart,

The tiny key is lost,

So there you must always stay.

One of the present authors was asked to produce a modern English version to be read out at a wedding. The simple yet heartfelt language in which the poem was written helped the translator to visualise the context and gain an idea of what the author might have been like. The voice appeared to be that of someone young and unspoilt, which might justify the use of simple English structures in the translation. But what about the language? Should the archaic form “thine” be used for the sake of authenticity and to preserve the rhyme, or would it be better to recreate the rhyme in a different way? If “thine” was thought to be too old-fashioned, could the mediaeval context be echoed by using less modern words in other parts of the poem?

One possible, slightly freer, version was the following:

You belong to me, I belong to you,

You need to know that this is true.

Would this work in a twenty-first century context? The issue with this was that a modern bride might well object to the idea of being described as belonging to anyone!

Another version with a slightly facetious opening that preserved the sounds in the German rhyme was

I’m yours, you’re mine,

You know that’s the bottom line.

You are locked away

In my heart,

The little key has gone astray,

So there you must always stay.

The translator was keen to preserve the rather quaint and touching tone of the original with “locked away” and “gone astray” but felt there needed to be a modern touch somewhere in the poem, and, if possible, it should scan. She tried to convey the poet’s assurances with a more colloquial expression “you know that’s the bottom line,” but the problem was that it just did not sound romantic. She tried to rectify this by removing “always” from the last line and adding another line to round off the poem. The final, still imperfect, version was

I’m yours, you’re mine,

You know that’s the bottom line.

In my heart you’re locked away

Because the key has gone astray,

And so you’ll have to stay.

There till the end of time.

You might like to try to improve on this yourselves, particularly on the second and the last lines.

Pause for thought: Think of a classic novel in your source language that you have seen in a dramatised version. Imagine that you have been asked to produce a new translation of the novel. Do you think the way you “view” the work as a translator might be influenced by the dramatised version, and if so, how?

Just to get you started, consider how you were affected by a recent popular television series; in the UK, for example, Debbie Horsfield’s reworking of Winston Graham’s Poldark, David Farr’s version of John Le Carré’s The Night Manager or Gwyneth Hughes’ adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (or literary adaptations for television or the cinema in other languages).

Context can be considered logistically as the space where an action, scene or idea takes shape in a specific setting or linguistically, where the term refers to the location of a lexical item in its surrounding discourse. Even a scholarly article needs some contextualisation (such as an introduction, some background or a premise which provides a platform for the definition and development of the theme through arguments, reasoning and information). Context is also an intellectual space, and a psychological one, as we shall see.

In his article on Icelandic sagas (see page 5), Oscar Wergeland relates the creation of a new literary form to the context of “the empire writing back to the motherland, in this case Iceland ‘writing back’ to Norway and to common Scandi navian oral traditions of poetry and story.”

Pause for thought: Can you think of a literary work that lacks a specific context (maybe a poem or existentialist piece of literature)? For instance, the mediaeval poem discussed earlier does not have a specific setting, although the language indicates that the poet came from one of the areas where Middle High German was spoken, that is, somewhere in what is now central and southern Germany, Austria or Switzerland. Do you think the lack of context makes the translation process easier or more difficult, or does that simply depend on the work itself?

Culture reflects a historical, geographical, linguistic and social setting; extra-contextual circumstances and information; traditions; values; and behaviour. These aspects provide the “local colour” that characterises a specific setting or action, by filling out the picture that the reader forms in his or her own mind (a process we call visualisation). It is important to remember that culture is not only relevant to the work itself but also to the author, the critic, the reader and the translator, who all contribute their “cultural share” to the environment in which the work exists.

The French intellectual and advocate of structuralism, Roland Barthes, was a major contributor to ideas about culture. In Le Degré Zéro (published in 1953), he asserted that “The political significance of writing is not simply a matter of political content or of an author’s overt political commitment but also of the work’s engagement with a culture’s literary ordering of the world” (Jonathan Culler, Barthes – A Very Short Introduction, OUP, 2002: 21). He attempted to change the way people think about culture, in particular, history, fashion and literature. The aim of the structuralists was to “shift the focus of critical thinking from subjects to discourse, from authors as sources of meaning to systems of convention operating within the discursive systems of social practice” (2002: 74). This shift in focus undermined the view that the author was “God” and the reader simply someone who processed literature without participating in it. In Image, Music, Text (1977), he famously referred to the “death of the author” and suggested that a text was a “multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (2002: 2), concluding that we should study texts rather than authors. This sparked a debate about the active role of the reader in which he or she contributes to the text (i.e., has a cultural share, rather than a passive involvement). In this perspective, the reader becomes important as the “repository of conventions, the agent of their application” (2002: 68).

As Hans Berten points out in Literary Theory – The Basics (3rd ed. Routledge: 2014), “Finally, after decades of neglect, there is a renewed interest in how readers actually process texts and attribute meaning to them.” It is sometimes easy to forget how wide and complex the network of stakeholders of a work can be. This network becomes even more extensive when translations of a work are involved. Therefore, we will also examine the part that stakeholders play in this complex web.

Pause for thought: What “cultural share” does a reader or a translator bring to the work? Imagine translating a favourite novel of yours, and say how your life experience, values, politics, likes and dislikes and so on might affect your attitude and approach to the translation.

The multiple ways in which our three perspectives interact and interweave create what we could call “infrastructure.” In Chapter 2, we will look more closely at criteria such as genre, form, discourse, meaning and style to show how language delivers and builds this infrastructure. For example, we consider how different languages use verbs (tenses, other verb forms or sequence of tense) to describe present, past and future actions and states, in direct and indirect speech and explore how tense use can differ significantly between languages. If we take a classic English thriller by Agatha Christie, for example, where the action is narrated ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Groundworks
• Chapter 2 Exploring time, context and culture through language
• Chapter 3 Analysing, translating, comparing, editing
• Chapter 4 How to enhance your writing skills
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index