Филологические науки / 6. Актуальные проблемы перевода

Lyubov Zrazhevska

East European University of Economics and Management, Cherkasy, Ukraine

Approaches to Translation

Translation is always a challenge. Approaches to translation always vary depending on translators. Some translators state that translation is at best an echo. Even the best translations are never a full and true reflection of its source, simply because no two languages in the world, not even the most closely related, are identical in their using of words and nuances. The best one can hope for is a rendition close enough to the original not to alter any of its meaning, full enough not to omit any detail, no matter how seemingly insignificant, and elegant enough to provide at least some of the stylistic character of the original text.

Translation can be cast in terms of the stitching together of two mental spaces that have many points in common and many differences. The best possible result in some kind of artistic unity in which aspects of both spaces – both cultures, both media, both works of art – are harmoniously combined. Aside from translation, pure creation often has this same type of origin.

The words are deeply rooted in the place, and if you rip them out of their native territory and apply them to entities in another place, you wind up silly or naïve. Thus no one would refer to Paris’s Metro as “the Paris underground”, or even worse, as “the Paris tube”, those terms being exclusively attached to its counterpart in London, nor would anyone talk about “the Paris subway”, even though in theory “subway” is a bland neutral term.

Although certain words are firmly anchored to things in a specific place, they not only can but should be used in distant places and even in distant tongues, precisely in order to evoke, inside the new framework, the local flavors that they are imbued with. Each such word is like a Trojan horse that once inside the ramparts of the alien city, bursts wide open and spills a horde of aliens into the heart of the other.

Form and content are deeply tied together, and that is why translation is such an art. The choice is, as it so often is in life, between two evils: on the one hand, a pervasive sense of mild stylistic inconsistency due to frame –blending, and on the other hand, a pervasive sense of self-contradiction, due to the medium and the message being utterly at odds with each other. Self-contradiction is the presence of confused and wrong ideas and inconsistency – as the mixing of different styles and the intermingling of different words. These are two vastly different evils, and between them lies the choice that one must face in translation.

Each new translation challenge requires a careful rethinking of choice. Nor is it a black and white choice; one can obviously find a continuum of intermediate positions between the black of zero frame-blending and the white of free-wheeling, anything-goes-frame-building. The art of good translation is not something that one can rigorously define and then write a perfect algorithm for. It is a product of intuition and experience. It is a state of grace that a translator strives for, but it can come only from deep within, at levels of oneself that one does not, cannot, and never will truly know.

As the Danish mathematician and poet Piet Hein wrote in a poem called Ars Brevis, one of his many memorable mini-maxims, called ”Grooks”: “there is one art, no more , no less: to do all things with artlessness. Languages are descrete entities, at least fairly cleanly separated from one another.

“When I tackle a translating challenge it is not in the least because I yearn to reveal to the poor deprived non-speakers of language X the hidden structure and meaning of some intricate passage in language Y – no, for me, translating is simply the sheer joy of trying to do something deeply paradoxical. It is just a game, an exercise in creativity, a challenge that provides a wonderful esthetic reward.

Sadly, guiltily but truthfully, I confess I am not someone who makes translations as gifts, someone who translates so that others might have the chance to discover and savor some otherwise forever-hidden jem of literature; no, I am just a selfish translator, someone who translates solely and entirely because doing so is exhilarating and beautiful and because it brings me into intimate contact with a work and an author that I admire.”

Sometimes the task of translation seems impossible at first but after its completion one receives the boost in self-confidence. The word-by-word, line-by-line building-up of translation is like the slow construction of a new bridge over the chasm. In theory, each local change mark to an already done translation can yield a new translation and the long chain of different translations. To avoid the ironic fate of drowning in an ocean of your own micro-variants you have to be courageous enough to part forever with lovely ideas that only a few minutes earlier you were terribly proud of.

Translation, one writes on paper, is only ideas that work, but there are a lot of mental forays down blind alleys, where you try out some potential word, and after some struggle, frustratedly discover that you can’t find any way to make it fit semantically.

As for the subtle yet telling differences between how a mediocre and a magisterial translator make use of one and the same process – how through this process one person can pull up a series of gems while another merely pulls up a succession of old muddy boots – that is another enigma, and a most beguiling one, but no one can answer it.

Translation involves much mental exploration of various potential scenarios, word choices, rival syntactic structures and so forth in each line. A word or a line or a theme that was initially warmly welcomed as a fine new member of the evolving translation can slowly lose favor and eventually be turned out. In the construction of sentences, paragraphs, chapters you are translating much the same kinds of intricately interwoven processes of exploration, construction, destruction, substitution, deletion, compression, expansion, regrouping, parallelization, interpolation and reordering were required on many levels.

We can say that any good translation’s ideal is to get across to a new group of readers the essence of someone else’s fantasy and vision of the world. A translator does to an original text something like what an impressionist painter does to a landscape: there is an inevitable and cherished personal touch that makes the process totally different from photography.

References:

1. Barnstone W. The poetics of translation / W. Barnstone. – New Haven : Yale University Press, 1995.

2. Hofstadter D. What is gained in translation / D. Hofstadter. – NY : Times book review, 1996.

3. Hofstadter D. To err is human / D. Hofstadter. – Michigan quarterly review, 1996. – vol. 28. – 1996.

4. Bryson B. Mother tongue / B. Bryson. – London : Penguin books, 1990.

5. Walter B. The task of the translator / B. Walter. – Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 1998.