kev67
05-30-2016, 07:26 AM
I was reading Sandra Smith's translator's note to The Outsider by Albert Camus. She wrote:
"Readers may wonder why a new translation of The Outsider is necessary. Primarily, it is essential to create new versions of classic works in another language because language constantly evolves. The original text is immutable yet translations should be written in a style that is accessible to the modern reader while conveying the spirit of the foreign text. Idiomatic speech in particular needs to be rendered in a way that feels true to the original without sounding dated."
What do you think about this? That must make reading something like a Shakespeare play in a foreign language, or something like The Divine Comedy in English a very different experience than for someone reading the work in their own language.I suppose it would be impossible to translate a Shakespeare play into a foreign language entirely accurately as the rhymes will be different and the iambic pentameter won't work. But even so, the language is arachaic and native speakers often struggle to follow it. Then some translations are great works of literature in their own right. The King James bible was a translation from Latin, or maybe it was translated directly from ancient Greek and Hebrew. More modern translations may be easier to understand, but lack its poetry. If you are reading a C19th book originally written in French, wouldn't it be better to read a C19th translation? You would get a better sense that the book was written in the C19th, and archaic terms would be translated into their contemporary equivalents. For example, an ostler was someone who looked after horses at an inn. I don't know what the C19th French term for an ostler was, but how would it be translated into English now, horse-tenderer, stableman?
"Readers may wonder why a new translation of The Outsider is necessary. Primarily, it is essential to create new versions of classic works in another language because language constantly evolves. The original text is immutable yet translations should be written in a style that is accessible to the modern reader while conveying the spirit of the foreign text. Idiomatic speech in particular needs to be rendered in a way that feels true to the original without sounding dated."
What do you think about this? That must make reading something like a Shakespeare play in a foreign language, or something like The Divine Comedy in English a very different experience than for someone reading the work in their own language.I suppose it would be impossible to translate a Shakespeare play into a foreign language entirely accurately as the rhymes will be different and the iambic pentameter won't work. But even so, the language is arachaic and native speakers often struggle to follow it. Then some translations are great works of literature in their own right. The King James bible was a translation from Latin, or maybe it was translated directly from ancient Greek and Hebrew. More modern translations may be easier to understand, but lack its poetry. If you are reading a C19th book originally written in French, wouldn't it be better to read a C19th translation? You would get a better sense that the book was written in the C19th, and archaic terms would be translated into their contemporary equivalents. For example, an ostler was someone who looked after horses at an inn. I don't know what the C19th French term for an ostler was, but how would it be translated into English now, horse-tenderer, stableman?