On the Homogenizing Dangers of Easily Translated Literature (2016) | Hacker News Reader

On the Homogenizing Dangers of Easily Translated Literature (2016)

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> The growing dominance of English has come to mean that European, African, Asian, and Latin American writers are considered to have “failed” if they are unable to reach an international audience.

Is this really true? I can absolutely see it as a possibility for countries that see the US as the centre of the intellectual and political world, like Germany, the U.K. or the Netherlands, but do countries with highly inflated senses of their international importance and power, (France) or a great sense of the beauty or transcendence of their high culture (Italy, Russia) really look to the US so much?

It can’t possibly be true, unless the opinion is coming from the slant that to be successful one must publish internationally —which seems odd. But I guess if you look at it from a Hollywood point of view where for s movie to be successful its international box office take should beat the domestic box office take, I guess that makes sense, but only because that is how they armed defining success themselves. That’s not necessary. In film, you have native Czech and Norwegian and Taiwanese film. They don’t need to become international blockbusters to bd successful.

Reporting in from Germany, not true. The domestic market is fairly big and it is understood that works of non-English origin usually don't do well in English-speaking countries.

Failed in what sense and judged by whom?

Speaking from central-European perspective I find that translations to other languages are generally valued at home, but I have not noticed any supremacy of English and English speaking countries.

It is very likely that a majority of cited researches around the world/internet are in English or have been translated to English to allow for easy accessibility to the wider community[1].

[1] https://www.researchtrends.com/issue-31-november-2012/the-la...

I can't see how this is true. There are many works of writing that cannot and should be not be translated to convey the full intention of the body of work. Translations can come close, but rarely can they convey the exact meaning and feel the original work can. To call it a failure because people who don't understand the native language don't read it is a travesty, and I can't see how anyone who takes artistic work seriously could agree that an imperfect copy of a work would tantamount to success.

Don't get me wrong, I love reading works from other cultures written in different languages, but I know that what I am reading may not show the true meaning of what the author intended. Does this make me sad? Yeah a little, I'm still glad I read it, but I know I don't get to see it for its true beauty.

The mentioned difficulties do not appear to actually be due to translation, but instead due to lacking the background to appreciate a given work as worth reading.

> Zoku meian [Light and Darkness continued], is a tour de force in which she creates a very plausible, stylistically pitch-perfect ending to Meian [Light and Darkness], the last, unfinished masterpiece by Natsume Sōseki, Japan’s most important modern novelist.

...

> As a fragmentary, dependent work, standing in relation to a classic text that is largely unknown outside Japan except to a handful of experts, it is, in effect, impossible to render into comprehensible English or, for that matter, any other language

If "Light and Darkness continued" had been written as a continuation of an English translation of Meian, it is likely that it would have failed to gather any significant readership except translated into Japanese as Zoku meian. That's simply due to targeting an audience that is already familiar with Meian and might pay attention to a well-written continuation.

A similar problem arises for Star Wars novelizations, without any translation involved. Being invested into the universe that serves as backdrop for the story is essentially a prerequisite for becoming a reader. If you tried to "translate" an English Star Wars novel for the English mass market, you'd fail the same as when translating a novel full of Japanese cultural references for the same market.

The "homogenizing danger" then isn't so much about writing to be translated, but about writing to be read by the largest possible number of readers, be it in translation or not. Other literature can exist, but you shouldn't expect it to get popular outside a small niche. Sometimes the niches are separated by language boundaries, other times they're not. I'd assume translated Star Wars novels to also appeal to Japanese Star Wars fans, for example.

Maybe this is just coming from my background as an academic and general nerd, but personally I would rather read a book that I don't fully understand, but had lots of notes and references to explain the context, than something that's been conceptually "translated".

As a general nerd I feel like this is a common experience and one that I've quite enjoyed when reading countless sci-fi/fantasy books.

You start of and many cultural references or things seem completely alien and only start to click once you're part way through.

Why not enjoy both? Son you enjoy the "flow" of reading a book that is within your grasp?

As with most literary criticism, I'm pretty skeptical of this. Thinking in the opposite direction, Snow Crash would be easier to translate than Neuromancer. Neuromancer would be easier to translate than Finnegan's Wake. That doesn't mean that Snow Crash is part of some homogeneous morass or any less worthy than those other two novels. Though I suppose many literary critics would prize the Joyce over the Stephenson, there are no absolutes in art. There is just what people like.

I felt the author was pretty careful in emphasizing that he's not declaring neither Mizumura nor Murakami is superior over the other, just that translatability can be a factor in how works spread.

BTW, all three works you mention has been translated into Japanese (including Finnegans Wake!) The translation for Neuromancer is also something to behold; Hisashi Kuroma, the translator, invented a literary "cyberpunk style" which can only be done with an Asian language. Words in Kanji are sprinkled with ruby text [1] which, instead of annotating the pronunciation of the word, fills in the romanized equivalent English neologism, eg. "接続" would be annotated not as "せつぞく" but as "ジャック・イン" (jack in).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character

I still haven't finished reading it end-to-end, but I love the form and shape of Hofstadter's "Le Ton beau de Marot"[0] which is sort of an extended dialogue on the difficulty, beauty and/or impossibility of translation. It's not just about language translation of course, being Hofstadter, but that's the entry point.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot

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