What are You Translating?
If you ask a translator what she or he are translating now, it would be rather simple to answer at any point as Hamlet did, “Words, words, words.”
But in all honesty, that’s not really what literary translation is about. Sure, a translator encounters countless words every day and writes nearly as many, but the real substance of the work of literary translation is about bringing much more than just words into the new language. In fact, the words are the part that can be most easily manipulated without damaging the faithfulness of the text. Or to put it another way, a rigid adherence to the same words quite often leads one to miss the mark completely.
You are Translating Culture
When you translate a literary text, you translate the culture in which it is embedded, often even including parts of that culture that are not overtly mentioned in the text. I have recently translated Zhang Ling’s 《劳燕》, which will be coming out with Amazon Crossing later this year. The novel centers on events that occured in Southern China during World War II. Many of the larger historical events surrounding the story of the novel can be confusing to readers unfamiliar with that particular place at that particular time, so the author, my editor, and I are currently combing through the manuscript to make sure the various allegiances and alliances alluded to in the book will be clear to a reader who is not familiar with terms, ideas, and events that are second nature to a Chinese reader. Even more difficult at this point, though, is finding a suitable title for the work, as simply translating the two word title is not at all feasible, given that the original title’s linguistic and cultural connections are impossible to duplicate with the same words in English. In both instances, the translation has to consider not words, but the culture to which those words belong, then duplicate those connections and connotations with added, dropped, or even completely other words than those that appear in the original.
You are Translating Effect
In translating a literary work, it is important to consider not just the meaning of the words, but the effect they have on the reader, as Paul Valery noted when he said, “Translating is producing analogous effects by different means.” The effect a text has is created not just by the words themselves, but also by the various techniques used in putting them together. This can often cause some difficulties in translating a work, because the same technique can produce different effects in different languages – sometimes even the opposite effect. For instance, stream of consciousness is a technique often employed by contemporary Chinese writers, which seems to me to make sense, as it is a natural fit for the Chinese language. Sentences in Chinese do not rely on the subject of the sentence as heavily as sentences in English do which, coupled with the fact that there are no verb tenses in Chinese, allows a passage to move more fluidly between different timeframes without feeling abrupt or jarring, like the same sentence would in English. This creates an ideal environment for moving in and out of the mind of various characters and alternating that with more distinctively third person style narratives, while also allowing for jumps back and forth in time, particularly inside the minds of these various characters. In Chinese, such writing is fast-paced, even with a bit of a bounce. By contrast, using the same techniques to create a passage of stream of consciousness writing in English results in a very slow-paced text. In translating such a passage, then, it is important to recreate the fast-paced effect of the text, even if one must utilize a completely different technique to do so.
You are Translating a Relationship
Finally, literary translation is about translating a relationship between a text and its reader. Not only is the text itself embedded in a particular culture, but so is the reader. It is important, then, to understand how a text interacts with its reader, what expectations it has of the reader, and how it speaks to the reader. From there, the translator must imagine how a reader in the new target audience will engage this text, and how to say the same thing to that reader that the original work says to its readers. This requires great understanding not only of the original text and the culture of which it is a part, but also insight into the new readership and the world they live in, including not only their day to day activities, but their overall relationship with literature.
Words are the easy part. Even machine translation can give you the right words much of the time. Putting them together so that you translate beyond the words and capture culture, effect, and relationship is a much bigger challenge.