Notes Along the Way: How to Avoid Disrupting the Flow
In my recent work translating a novel, I ran into an interesting example of an issue that often pops up when I translate from Chinese to English. It is also a problem that I frequently see in the work of translators from Chinese who are not native speakers of English. This particular issue arises from the different ways these two languages treat time. Chinese is a very fluid language, moving easily back and forth from past to present or future time frames without there being any feel of a break. This seamless movement not only occurs between timeframes, but also between points of view, with the Chinese language allowing for easy movement between one character’s view and another’s, or between an external and internal view of the action involving a single character, with the latter being what happens in the text I want to highlight today.
English, by contrast, is a more rigid language in many ways, but especially in its insistence on sticking within a single tense and a single point of view, for the most part. This does not mean we never see shifts between times or POVs, but that when we do, a clear transition is needed. Failure to provide such a transition in an English language text feels like one of two things: experimental writing or bad writing.
Translating from a more fluid to a more rigid language, as happens when moving from Chinese to English, will naturally mean coming across some passages that will feel bumpy if they are rendered precisely as they appear in the original language. This being the case, the literally accurate rendering of that text becomes less faithful to what the original expresses.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to A Polite Lie to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.