"Translating often means rebelling against one's own language." - Eco
I see translators as purveyors of language, students of language, and probably lovers of language in most cases. As such, the urge to exploit the target language would be strong, and it would be difficult to restrict the use of the language to translate a simple or austere text. I think the tendency is in us to think more is better: higher diction is better; word play is better; detailed imagistic description is better. We want to push language to its limits, stretch into all of its corners. Like Kelly and Zetzsche say, "Languages are living breathing entities that can be formed into virtually any shape or form that a translator wants them to inhabit" (111). I would imagine that an inexperienced translator could justify adding some flourishes by thinking that he was correcting "deficiencies" in a source text . What I understand Eco to mean by his statement "translating often means rebelling against one's own language" is that the translator must resist the urge to do everything I have described above. In fact, not just resist the urge, but be vigilant against creating something in the translation that is not in the source text even incidentally, just as he describes in his example using the word "sylvie."
I got a little taste of this when working on our first translation problem, translating the slogan. My product was green tea. However, no part of the slogan dealt with the fact that it was "green" tea. Only tea. However, knowing that I was going to lose the word play that exists between the homonyms tea and you in Italian (the/te), I was tempted to reach beyond the message of the slogan and pull in an idiom using "green" (such as "green with envy") to preserve some of the playfulness. In the end, I decided it was inappropriate because doing so would bring in ideas and associations that are not at all present in the original. Still, I see that the temptation to do so is there.
Valerie,
ReplyDeleteAfter working on several different projects in this class, I too can see the temptation to try and translate a work into current references and modern language to better portray the idea of the work or slogan. However, as I learned the hard way, modern terminology and cultural baggage might weigh down a work with unintended references. For example, if a poem were to refer to a place as "ground zero" in its native language, when translating into English, that phrase carries so much modern baggage in regard to 9/11. In this particular case, you might have to play with some of the terminology and wording to avoid such heavy lines in a poem or work. Looking back at my slogan translation, if I had decided to go with "we knead you" as Moira suggested in class, I would have been bringing in tons of sexual connotations that didn't previously exist. The question becomes, how do I both bring the reader to writer while bringing the writer to the reader?