Translation versus original

[barbara0207]

Have you ever read a book in translation and found that some passages sounded funny, somehow wrong?

Recently, I read "84 Charing Cross Road" by Helene Hanff, a simple little book that can make people laugh and cry at the same time. I had the English original, a friend of mine read the German translation. She said there were a few passages she could not understand. Here are two examples:

The original says, "I don't add too well in plain American, I haven't a prayer of ever mastering bilingual arithmetic", meaning she didn't have a chance of doing sums in British pounds. The translator says, she cannot pray any more.

Original: (A woman is looking for someone at a book store) "But it was one-ish when I went in, I gather they were all out to lunch and I couldn't stay any longer." The translation says, "But I was all alone when I went in ...", which doesn't make any sense at all.

Have you ever had similar problems with translations?

[manolia]

With a lot of books. That's why i'm always on the watch for original copies, in the languages i can read tolerably, that is.

[Annamariah]

I've always been interested in different translations (okay, not always, but ever since I started reading in English and later in Swedish). I'm actually applying to university to become a translator. (Let's hope I'll get in )

Sometimes it happens that the translator has misunderstood the original sentence so that it's meaning changes when it's translated, but that's not very usual. More often mistakes are something like a few words or a sentence missing somewhere (sometimes even a couple of sentences from some chapter) or selecting a synonym that has not quite the same meaning as the original word in that context.

There can never be a perfect translation, because different languages have always different vocabularies and different expressions that cannot be translated directly to other languages. A good translation, however, doesn't feel like a translation when you read it. Sometimes you can see too clearly that some text is translated. There might be phrases that do not sound right, or structures that are more from the original language than from the one the text is translated to.

[Aiculík]

LotR.

The guy who translated it into Slovak is... no. I won't be rude because of that creature.

On the beginning, for example (I don't have books here) it is said that after Galadriel's departure, there was no one left who remembered history of elves.

But, in the translation, it said, after Galadriel's death... and Galadriel became man.

I could pherhaps forgive him, if it was the only mistake. Unfortunatelly, it wasn't. And if he wasn't one very renowned translator. Well maybe his other translations are better, but I'll never find out. I check every translation from English now and when I see his name, I ignore the book until I find original.

[Annamariah]

I must admit that I was really shocked when I read "A Little Princess" by Frances Hodgson Burnett in English. I'd read it in Finnish several times, (though the first time it was probably read to me when I was a small kid) so I knew it basically by heart already. So I was surprised when I realised "this sentence doesn't sound familiar at all", checked the Finnish translation and saw that it was missing there. All put together there are several pages missing from the translation, yet there is no mention about the book being abridged when translated.

[Demona]

Once I got a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover...what a "masterpiece" it was....unbelievable...Not only half of the book was really 'funny' it missed half of the punctuation marks...I was barely able to finish it (the situation was i HAD to read it there wasn't a possibility to get another copy, original or another translation).
A student at my former university wrote her diploma on translating tehcniques and such stuff. She compared the original and some translation into Russian of Harry Potter. The funny thing was that...yes, some passages were missing. But some were just....written in. You know, the translator obviously just added....

Originals forever :P

[barbara0207]

There can never be a perfect translation, because different languages have always different vocabularies and different expressions that cannot be translated directly to other languages. A good translation, however, doesn't feel like a translation when you read it. Sometimes you can see too clearly that some text is translated. There might be phrases that do not sound right, or structures that are more from the original language than from the one the text is translated to.

You are right about that. Wherever human beings work there will be errors and misunderstandings. But I think there is no excuse for sloppiness. (I'm sure you will be a very careful translator... )

[barbara0207]

Yes, I agree with you all, reading the original is always the best thing to do. But sometimes you can't help reading a translation, and then it would be nice to be sure that they have been done carefully.

There is one thing that has just struck me. Above I wrote there is no excuse for sloppiness. But perhaps there is? Could it be that publishers pay translators so badly that the translation must be done in a hurry because otherwise one couldn't make a living by translating?

[Demona]

There is one thing that has just struck me. Above I wrote there is no excuse for sloppiness. But perhaps there is? Could it be that publishers pay translators so badly that the translation must be done in a hurry because otherwise one couldn't make a living by translating?

Maybe that someone should get another job then?
I understand that it's a real pity when you don't get enough money for the work you've done. I'd rather not be ashamed of how've done it though...

[barbara0207]

Maybe that someone should get another job then?
I understand that it's a real pity when you don't get enough money for the work you've done. I'd rather not be ashamed of how've done it though...

Hmm, you're really harsh on them. But probably you're right. Personally, I could never be a translator. I'd hover over one and the same passage for hours just to find an even better translation. So I'd probably starve to death. So perhaps it's not even fair that I complain about sloppiness ...

[Dante Wodehouse]

I'm thinking of learning Italian to read the original Inferno. Would you literary people recommend it?

[barbara0207]

I'm thinking of learning Italian to read the original Inferno. Would you literary people recommend it?

By all means. Although it will take you a long time to master the language so that you can read the original. But if you are young enough and have the time, have a go at it. Nothing compares to the original. Translations are always second best They can give you the general idea but if you want to go into detail and study specifics, you need the original.

[nps_marina]

As all of you, I always try to read originals better than translations because, as most of you, sometimes I find myself faced with thing like the bad, bad, bad translation for The World According to Garp.

I had the spanish translation, so I begun it on a Sunday- and had this gut feeling on certain passages, that they sounded so strange. On Monday I went and bought the original, and begun again.
Never have I been more suprised to find that when, in the Spanish translation it tells about the kids having chicken pox and checking their vomit to see if they're sterile; the English make more sense by telling they checked their *other bodily fluids* that would show if they are sterile (I have no idea how strong the censorship is on this page...).

It made me quite mad, actually.
Perhaps translators are paid badly and then they have to do things quickly and sloppily, but this is just plain BAD. One wonders about all the books not read in the original... what have I been missing, just because some translator decided to change huge chunks of text???

I could rant on forever...!

AnnaMaria, my sister is studying translation herself (though that would be here in Spain, I doubt that you two would meet in class or anything). Here fisr language (to translate) being sp-english; and the second one, french.

[Taliesin]

Well, one of the best mistakes we know is a mistranslation of the word spinning wheel. In a medieval castle, in the room of a princess...and it was translated as part of the spinning (fishing equipment).

[aabbcc]

Translation - especially of poetry - is a form of art; rather than pure mechanic translation and conversion from one system to another, it is re-writing the work in another language, trying to perserve at most the original "feeling". Every translation, thus, is a form of interpretation of the work, and can never be the original in its essence.

However, there are translations that are wonderful and that - if that is not out of the realm of possibility - actually sound better than the originals; good translators sometimes follow the "sensum pro senso" rule to an extent that their translations can be beautiful. Or sometimes the sense itself can be so "congenial" to the language one translates to that it simply produces an effect of the original... if not more.
I have always preferred a lot of Russian poetry in Croatian/Serbian translations. It was not the matter of the knowledge of the language - all the two/three were my native languages - but the matter of "that something" inside the language that captures the idea well, and the matter of the reader himself. In the other hand, there were Russian works I have read entirely intranslatable, which no translations - neither to Slavic languages - managed to "capture", it was only the original that produced an effect.

I generally prefer to read books in originals, then in translation if I have the need to re-read the work, unless, of course, I cannot speak the language and am thus forced to read only translation. Each language carries a specific mindset, a specific taste and is as "glasses" from which to observe the world, and even when the 'contents' of the world are the same, the view is dramatically different from language to language.