In the native tongue

[Eva Marina]

:idea: Do you think it's better to read something in the language it was originally written in?
We just read this article in a class of mine at school and the author was saying how he was learning Ancient Greek in order to read Homer's works because it held a certain...je ne sais quoi, for lack of a better term :). But is a work of literature really better in it's original form? Is there really something lost in translation?

[bluevictim]

It's good that this topic finally came up as its own thread, since it pops up here and there pretty often. I just made a comment here about it, and this is more or less a whole thread about translating Homer.

[PeterL]

:idea: Do you think it's better to read something in the language it was originally written in?
We just read this article in a class of mine at school and the author was saying how he was learning Ancient Greek in order to read Homer's works because it held a certain...je ne sais quoi, for lack of a better term :). But is a work of literature really better in it's original form? Is there really something lost in translation?

As a general matter, I would say that reading something in the language is better than any translation. That would be more true for something like Homer's works, because they were composed orally and the meter was important. As I wrote elsewhere, Umberto Eco rewrote one of his books in English, because the initial attempt at translation wasn't adequate. There are some prose works that are no worse for translation. And then there is Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam, which is said to be at least as good in translation as in the original, but I don't read Medieval Persian, so I don't know that for sure.

My final answer: Probably

[Eagleheart]

There is a word choice that is strictly engaged with cultural and local characteristics that are lacking in the vocabulary of the language into which the translation is made for example. As these words convey the overall meaning of the book's background, perhaps something will be always missing...-to find closeness in translation is no better than to put commas in Becket...

[bluevictim]

From another thread:


Do you hold then that Thoreau's point is still relevant? Do you suggest that one actually does need a thorough grounding in ancient Greek to come to a full appreciation of Homer?I think a question that everyone has to answer for themselves is: what does it mean to "come to a full appreciation of Homer"?

Certainly, if everything else is equal, more familiarity with Homer's Greek would result in a fuller appreciation of Homer, but there are many other factors. For example, knowledge of the historical context in which the Homeric poems were performed, or the historical events which inspired the poems, or the culture of the composer and audience would also enhance one's appreciation of Homer. All of this would make the appreciation "fuller" by increasing the understanding of what the original audience would have experienced, or what the composer intended.

There are other ways to appreciate Homer, though. In the 21st centuray AD, who is to say that the most important goal is to understand the originial intent of the poet? Perhaps, instead of spending a lifetime studying archaic Greece, it would be more beneficial to spend the time reflecting on how the stories of the poems relate to our current situation. Perhaps the time would be better spent composing new poems or novels or movies inspired by the Homeric epics.


"Translating Homer (for example) is kind of like copying an oil painting with watercolors." I like that analogy. In that way then, no amount of comparison between various translations could bring one to a ultimate sense of the original. How unfortunate.I don't think that any amount of comparison of various translations could ever replace knowledge of the original language. However, it doesn't have to be that unfortunate. One translation will bring a reader maybe 50-75 percent of the way there. Just because a translation will never fully replace the original doesn't mean it's useless. I think Homer is quite amenable to translation, compared to other pieces of ancient Greek poetry. I think enough comes through a translation for any reader to be deeply inspired.

I do think it would be a shame if a large amount of people neglected the original language and the original intent of the poems, but they are so rich that plenty can be gained through translation. I think this is true of other works, as well.

[Shannanigan]

I definitely think that it might be a more fulfilling experience to read a work in its original language...but at the same time I have heard some people say that they went out of their way to learn new languages just to be able to do so, only to realize after learning the language and re-reading the work that they hadn't really lost much in the translation after all.

For someone who is doing focused, long-term studies on works that were originally in another language, I think it would be very beneficial to learn the original language and read the works as they were first written, so they could study language usage and whatnot...but if you're just reading for the heck of it or for a class that's going to be over within a few months, translations probably do just fine.

[Pensive]

:idea: Do you think it's better to read something

Better? Yes! It is ten times better, especially this is the case with Urdu. Some words of Urdu are so beautiful, but yet when translated, looses so much that it really annoys me to see how a beautiful Urdu poem looks immensely ugly when translated in English!

Today, we were writing some sort of Creative Writing for our English class, and a girl suddenly stood up and asked teacher, "Ma'am, what will be the English of rus gholna?

Another girl jumped into the conversation and said, "It will be pouring juice in ears.

Though that other girl was very right about the exact translation, but it got the whole class laughing badly....see how awkward/weird it can be!

Reading books in their actual language is another aspect for which I am obsessed with learning languages. I will really like to read actual Heidi one day, will love to read poetry which wouldn't have been translated from another language! :)

[PeterL]

Today, we were writing some sort of Creative Writing for our English class, and a girl suddenly stood up and asked teacher, "Ma'am, what will be the English of rus gholna?

Another girl jumped into the conversation and said, "It will be pouring juice in ears.


I was just wondering if that means the same as the English: "Filling ears with honey." It isn't common and is usually said a little differently, depending on who would say it.

[Pensive]

I was just wondering if that means the same as the English: "Filling ears with honey." It isn't common and is usually said a little differently, depending on who would say it.
Hmmm well literally you can say so, but it is not the exact translation. And even if the girl would have adopted it, the sentence would have looked a bit awkward, at least I think so. It would have been:

The music was filling her ears with honey.

It doesn't look really good. Maybe it is just okay, but if you know Urdu and know what kanoon mein ras gholna is, then it would look very unreal and weird to you.

[Annamariah]

:idea: Do you think it's better to read something in the language it was originally written in?
(...) Is there really something lost in translation?
I do think that translations are always somewhat different than original texts, but I don't think that it necessarily makes them worse.

I've read lots of books both in English and in Finnish (and some books even in Swedish so that I can compare the original text and two translations :D). Some translations are really good, others aren't, it depends quite a lot on the translator.

The main reason why translations can still be very good and even better than the original texts is that no foreign language is ever quite the same than your mother tongue. Even if my English is pretty fluent and I understand almost everything I read, I do not get all the deepest meanings from the language like I do when I read books in Finnish. No matter how much you study a foreign language (except if you really live somewhere where you use that language every day so that it can't really be called a "foreign language" to you any more) it will never be as much "yours" than your mother tongue.

I hope someone understood what I was trying to say... I do find expressing myself in English a bit difficult sometimes :D (Never quite as easy as in Finnish!:lol: )

[Jean-Baptiste]

I think you've expressed yourself very concisely and fluently, Annamariah.
"(except if you really live somewhere where you use that language every day so that it can't really be called a "foreign language" to you any more)" That is a very good point.

Thank you, bluevictim, for linking this thread to our recent discussion elswhere.

How do you all view the relationship between human communication in general and idiosyncracies of dialect? Do you think it's actually true that various cultures own concepts entirely unique to them, which are not capable of being conveyed to another culture through language? I like to think that there must be some fundamental equivalent to all human concepts that would bridge a language barrier, but that may just be my ignorant, wishful opinion.

[Annamariah]

Thanks! :)

Do you think it's actually true that various cultures own concepts entirely unique to them, which are not capable of being conveyed to another culture through language? I like to think that there must be some fundamental equivalent to all human concepts that would bridge a language barrier, but that may just be my ignorant, wishful opinion.

There are some phrases which are pretty much the same in many languages, but each language has some phrases that just can't be translated without changing them somehow. Vocabularies vary a lot, too. For example, in Finnish there are many different words for "snow", (lumi, puuterilumi, nuoska, räntä etc.), depending on what kind of snow it is (wet, dry etc.), when in some languages there might not be any word for snow at all. Same goes with every language, they all have their special words and phrases that can't be directly translated into other languages.

Well, I do still believe that most of the basic everyday vocabulary is quite translateable (is that a word?) in all the languages, yet there are always some things that can be difficult to explain to someone who doesn't know the culture.

[Whifflingpin]

"Do you think it's actually true that various cultures own concepts entirely unique to them, which are not capable of being conveyed to another culture through language?"

Not only cultures, but even generations. So reading books of 100, or 50 or even 20 years ago, one may understand all the words, but have no appreciation of the attitudes that underlie and inspire those words. Sometimes a culture shift can occur in a very short time. I recall that I read the Victorian school novel "Tom Brown's Schooldays" when I was 11 or 12, in the very early 1960s. The values and attitudes in that book were still the underlying values of school life. My younger brother read the book at the same age, at the end of the 60s, and he could not understand that anyone could ever have held such values.

[Eva Marina]

There are other ways to appreciate Homer, though. In the 21st centuray AD, who is to say that the most important goal is to understand the originial intent of the poet? Perhaps, instead of spending a lifetime studying archaic Greece, it would be more beneficial to spend the time reflecting on how the stories of the poems relate to our current situation. Perhaps the time would be better spent composing new poems or novels or movies inspired by the Homeric epics.

You raise a good point, as so many people are so focused in squeezing as much out of a work of literature as possible--not a bad thing :)--that they can sometimes regard reading foreign texts in translation as being not worthwhile, which is not the case. It's implausible to go around learning every language on the face of the earth just to enjoy a piece in its entirety. That said, I think that even with the translations there is something to gain with reading a novel in the original language. Again, going back to Homer, his Illiad starts off in some translations with Achilles as the subject of the first clause, others having the abstract idea of Rage. In fact, neither is incorrect, for it is both. The way Ancient Greek works is so fluid that many ideas can co-exist in one phrase. With a translation, you only get one version: Rage or Achilles. So with any translation of a piece, you only get one version of the ideas that were presented--sometimes it might not differ all that much, but you also miss out on some of the other ideas--only one layer.
It's a question without a definite answer--those are the kind I like best! :)

[loe]

Hello!

I agree that the original text usually is better than a translation.
In my opinion the only kind of texts where translations are no or nearly no problem are non-fiction texts. If you explain the life of birds or the possibility how to repair a car the content will be more important than the way of saying it.
Beside poems I think that philosophical texts are very difficult to translate, because they often use every possible meaning of one word – and therefore it is very difficult to find a fitting expression in another language.

Of course, if someone is not familiar with aforeign language, it is better to read a translation than to get frustrated.
I try to read Proust in French (really strenuous:rolleyes: )

Greetings

I’m afraid, that my English is not very good. I haven’t used it for years. But I hope, it is possible to understand the essential meanings and that there isn’t too much lost in translation.;)

[higley]

I think that meaningful messages can transcend any translation. Look at the Bible, for instance. It's been translated into goodness knows how many languages and has had impact through every one of them. Certainly some Hebraic and Greek phrases have lost a little bit through their conversions to other languages, but that hasn't diminished the Bible's significance.

Though for books on a lesser scale: I've read Harry Potter in both English and German, and it's funny how some sentences are pulled almost word for word from the English text and other sentences hardly make any sense at all. It did make me think that there were small nuances that perhaps took something away from the translation, but at the same time there were German nuances that were substituted and worked fine in their own right. Obviously people worldwide seem to appreciate the same qualities in the books that native English-speakers do! :)

[Jean-Baptiste]

I was about to bring up the Bible, higley. I was wondering about the various modern versions of the Bible (at least the ones that I know of in English) with information on word origins and possible alternate interpretations. This seems to be along the lines of my query about comparison of various translations of Homer (in the thread linked above by bluevictim). Do you think that such a method of translation could become the norm with books other than the Bible? It also seems common for essayists to relate the origins of specific words or phrases, along with possible alternative translations, in making points about history or literature (it seems Thoreau was fond of doing this.)

Of course, it would turn any text into an exorbitantly lengthy compendium of linguistic data, but that may be preferable to being left with possibly half the implications of a text. I purchased the annotated versions of James Joyce's "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake," which are both about the same length as the original novels without even including the original text. If it takes that much space to explicate the myriad allusions in an English novel--granted these are no ordinary novels--for English speaking readers, I would imagine something similarly daunting, if not more so, to be necessary for explicating the nuances of ancient Greek for non-Greek-speaking students.

[Eva Marina]

I agree completely. Translation are tricky things that way. And yet, sometimes a word's etymology can go so far back to even hieroglyphics or Sanskrit derivation, which is an interesting process to go through, let me tell you :). A word's history can be almost, if not moreso in some cases, as interesting as the actual meaning of the word.

[subterranean]

I'm currently taking distance learning in English for translation and the background why I decided to take this course was because when I was in college, I found translated text books very inadequate. I thought that must be because the quality of the translators. Then, after taking this course, I found that it doesn't neccesarly because the language ability of the translator, but also because (as mentioned in previous posts) when we translate texts from one language to another, there's a possibility of missing contexts or different meanings, not only because cultural differences but also because the different levels of the language development.

I went to this small coffee shop this morning and it has this "take away" menus. The shop translates the words take away to bawa pergi, which more or less have the same meaning.

bawa = take
pergi = go

But eventhough the meaning is more or less the same, we (local) hardly say bawa pergi when we we want to eat/drink the food/beverage somewhere else and this translation sounds akward in our ears. This is mostly because we have some local terms for it, even before the term take away "came" to our country.

[Arguendo]

I have a problem reading Russian authors because the sentence structure doesn't translate well into Norwegian, in my opinion. The sentences tend to look stilted and vaguely childish, and that annoys me.

Not enough to make me learn Russian, though. Yet.

Some languages lose a lot of their lyrical qualities in translation, and it also depends on which language they're translated into. It's not just the actual meaning of the words and expressions that may be lost or changed.

Sometimes, when reading translations, I cringe when I notice where the original language shines through and messes with the feel of the translation language. This is very noticeable in translations from Danish to Norwegian, as the languages are nearly identical but NOT QUITE, and the general idea is that anyone who knows nada about Danish can still translate it. WRONG WRONG WRONG.

To me, it's very important that the language in a book has a natural flow to it, that the translation into it focuses on making it work in THAT language, and tweaks the expressions and the feel of the original accordingly.

[Koa]

I have a problem reading Russian authors because the sentence structure doesn't translate well into Norwegian, in my opinion. The sentences tend to look stilted and vaguely childish, and that annoys me.




Reading some sentences in Russian fills me with awe. They have such a lovely, weird, complicated yet direct structure...aaaah. I'll never be able to write/speak Russian like a real Russian and that frustrates me.

Well, since a few years ago, I read only originals, if that's possible of course, that is I know the language and the book is easily available in original. I just don't see the need of using a medium like translation if I can avoid it and go directly to the core.
On the other hand, reading is more difficult...it takes a longer time and much more concentration and will, so I find myself reading less if I'm currently reading an original version... :(

Some translations are good, but they aren't the original. So they're not what it was meant to be. They're a useful, fantastic thing to help us having everything, but if you can avoid them, why not...