Against Translation

As a native speaker of Russian, I often see lamentations from native Russian speakers how "real cool" phrases in print and movies when translated from Russian into English become ugly and simplistic as if rendered by a caveman.

That's because a lot of Russian speakers are under the impression English is just a linear calque of Russian with English vocabulary[0]. But natural languages are not isomorphic to each other. I was just watching Family Guy and remembered this scene where Peter responds "I know my way around a joke or two" to a question "who's the funniest dude in the house?" or something to that effect[1]. The phrase "to know one's way around something" doesn't exist in Russian in its literal form. Speaking of "ways", the phrase "I fought my way to the top" is another one that doesn't have a direct Russian counterpart. These phrases are the product of English speaking mind. Russian has its own unique phraseology that usually gets butchered when ported into English. The point is what one thinks sounds cool in one's native tongue doesn't have to sound just as cool in the target language as natural languages never sat down at a round table to agree to have 100% linear correspondence between each other. By the way, in one Russian translation of that Family Guy episode they make up their own (I should say funny) joke instead of translating "I know my way around a joke".

[0] Obviously, you can replace "Russian" with any other ethnicity/nationality and "English" with any other language.

[1] "To that effect" or "along those lines" are yet other English phrases that do not stand in one-to-one correspondence with any idioms in Russian.

I'm seeing many dismissive comments, and as this seems to be due to the length of the piece, I would warmly recommend anyone interested in languages, literature (and especially their cross-cultural implications) to set it aside to read when they have the time. It is a very beautiful article, whose form is inescapably related to its content. It voices an unease which I suspect will feel familiar to many international, non-English-native readers (like me), as well as native English speakers (like the author).

An aspect of this conversation which I feel is particularly relevant for many of us here: the perception of language as simply a means to communicate information, a tool to be optimized with respect to its purpose, as though "information" existed in a vacuum. In my experience, this perception is particularly strong among speakers of dominant languages (languages either in which things are most likely to be spoken, or into which things are routinely translated to reach a broader audience), but it can also infuse in "dominated" language groups. I've seen this first hand among close relatives who delude themselves into thinking they have as much expressive power in English as in their native language, which they don't, not just because of their inability to speak it (though that plays a part) but because their life experience hasn't "soaked" in the English language, or (maybe) vice-versa.

One expression that I will long meditate from the article, and which I think applies more broadly than just literature "the continuous encounter of young people with a tradition".

(the irony is not lost on me that I have to write this comment in English. Maybe you see the irony but, if you only speak English, this irony is probably of a different color than the one I see, without value judgment)

English is not my first language but I feel fluent enough that the majority of my book reading nowadays are in English, I studied for some time in a English speaking country and I watch movies and tv shows without subtitles.

So, although I’m not a native speaker I feel deeply invested in the English language. All this to say that I still struggle with many rarely used words. Or archaic uses of the language. I constantly use my kindle dictionary to look for non usual words for birds, plants, etc that I never stumbled upon before.

If I do this for a language that I invested 20+ years of serious media/book consumption I’m absolutely out of luck reading anything in French or, god forbid, Russian (two of my favorite literary countries).

Yeah, I will never have that deep soul bonding connection with Russian authors that only those who speaks their beautiful language can experience, but I had enough experience reading good translations in my mother tongue and reading the original in English that I’m confident that It’s not a huge loss.

Speaks as if "translation" doesn't happen in reading in native languages. A word's meaning can change every other decade, when I'm reading something in native tongue I'm constantly rationalizing what I read into my own words, which I would categorize as translation. Some good translators' work might even convey more accurate original intent than reading natively yourself because they're supposed to study the context of the writing thoroughly.

One interesting point I heard from a Lex Friedman podcast is it'll be interesting to do a database of diffs between different translated versions of the same literatures. I think stuff like this can greatly aid people's understanding of the original intents.

> There was no doubt that there was a lot in our collective past that was shameful — though how this made us different from every other nation was never clear to me. What was clear was that feeling ourselves to be the worst was — like feeling ourselves to be the best — characteristic of our particular form of national narcissism. And I thought that, if we were going to turn our backs on our patrimony, we ought to do it consciously. We ought, at the very least, to know what that culture was, what it had been

Wise words.

Having read Murakami first in English then in Japanese then years later again in Japanese after living in the culture each was a different but worthwhile experience. The last was in some ways least exciting because I realized that characters I had thought of as fascinatingly original or quirky just referred to tropes or stereotypes in the broader culture. I don’t think any literature really gives an accurate sense of another culture unless you have other base knowledge. I’m interested in Russia somewhat but I read Dostoveysky almost as occuring in some universal European setting, I don’t read for the details of Russian culture.

I love reading books in their native language, especially when there is no translation available. It's like having a key to an exclusive world that others can't access. It is, however, quite a bit of work to learn a new language simply to be able to read works in that language and I'm not sure if it provides much value aside from a smug sense of being educated and multilingual.

I found languages that are distant (English - Chinese) are generally harder to translate, and languages that are closer are much easier (English - Dutch, Chinese - Korean).

Some people are against translation, some people are okay with it, but it mostly boils down to the meaning of the text itself and the two languages that people are working with.

Things are easier to translate: 1) describe something objective like scientific fact or mechanism like "water is made up by hydrogen and oxygen" 2) communicate with commands like "pass me that bottle of water". It's possible to translate legal documents or business requirements faithfully if the translator knows the two of the language really well.

Things are hard to translate:

1) Puns: "Nothing right is left, and nothing left is right".

2) Aesthetics: Chinese people especially love to use the word "big/great/grand", it can be beautiful in Chinse but usually sounds awkward in English.

3) Contexts: like many Chinese people today would still use a lot of ancient idioms, which is a compact four-character format that describes an ancient story that happened millennials ago, and they're referring to the moral of those stories. Korean also use a lot of those idioms which make things much easier to translate.

4) Culture: This is the key difference, everybody knows it but it's always more than I assumed. Say there's a talk from a successful person talking about his experience - an American would probably focus on how hardworking he/she was, while a Chinese would very likely focus on rendering the bitterness he/she has encountered during the process (it has something to do with the Eastern Asian Buddhism background, and takes a lot of footnotes to make things clear to the Western audience). At the end of the day, it's not the languages that are different - it's the things that people talking about that are different.

Of course it would be great to read books in their native language, but is it better to get a reasonable translation of a book, or no translation at all? That is the question.

If you take some authors with multiple translations over many decades, e.g. Proust or Hugo, you can see that the early translations are actually very rough, and only recently are we seeing very high quality.

The main problem is that language translation is forever imperfect. If you look at Proust's French, there is no direct translation into English for the way it is written because no English person writes in that manner, so the translator has to make a lot of hard decisions to make the book enjoyable.

My French isn't strong enough to read native Proust (god, I wish it was), but then you have things like Hugo which is 1800s French and I'm sure even modern French kids have some trouble reading it.

If you do read a translated book, PLEASE find the best translation before you purchase. I'll give you an example...

This Les Mis book has the same illustration on the front (public domain) as the musical poster, so it looks official: https://www.amazon.com/Miserables-Signet-Classics-Victor-Hug...

But it is a miserable 100 year old translation spruced up a bit. You will probably hate the book and hate your life if you try to read it. It boasts that it is unabridged because that seems like a thing you would want, but...

This new translation by Penguin is like night and day: https://www.amazon.com/Miserables-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp...

It is somewhat "abridged" because the translator took the bold step of tearing out 50 pages of the book - that are basically just the author going on a rant and has nothing to do with the story - and translated them and stuffed them in the appendix. This was a smart move, and went above their job title to produce a much more readable work.

tl;dr: read more great foreign books; always check you are getting the best translation before you start

I found this piece extraordinarily insightful, and it resonated with so much I have observed in my own life. I read it from start to finish.

Just since we're all on the topic, anyone with an interest in literary translation owes it to themselves to read the book This Little Art by Kate Briggs.

This was too long for me to understand. The author should just get to the point they want to make.

It's odd that in the whole course of this very long article, Moser doesn't use the word "power" in describing the relationship of English and its literature to the rest of the world, or the relationship of the language and literature to its own speakers. Most of his laments and descriptions of decline, the fraught and tricky questions of bringing books and authors into English, boil down to a question of power -- economic and geopolitical power -- and yet he never quite comes out and says that.

Mizimura's "defense" of her writing against English; the elevation that occurs for a non-English writer when they are translated into English; the perceived "universality" of English; the resultant cultural guilt of English speakers: these are manifestations of power.

Likewise, the deracination of English, its divorce from specific place and people, is a result of power. He seems to think it is a result of a change in the culture: "I began to wonder if the culture that threatened other languages was hollowing out English, too. That culture goes by many disparaging names. It was called “corporate,” “capitalist,” “neoliberal”; it was taught as “Business English.” It was the vehicle of the infrastructure, for the most basic communication: for checking into a hotel, sending an email, participating in a sales conference."

But this is not a cultural problem, it is a power problem. Power in our current (American) society is inherent in the infrastructure he mentions. It exists within the movement of capital, within corporate law, within lobbying, within international trade. Language becomes hollowed out and denatured in this situation, because there is no culture, culture is not required to run the machines of power.

Likewise the observation that the international literature that we're comfortable with (I say "we" here, as I am also a white, middle-aged, middle-class, American literary translator) reads much like our own. We seek out foreign literature that feels like it was written for us: it feels that way because it was written by and for an equivalent socioeconomic class, one that simply hails from a different country. Moser says we might benefit more from reading literature from Paris, Texas than we would from Paris, France: that is because this putative literature from Texas comes from a world that does not have power. It is more educational to reach across power boundaries than it is to reach across language boundaries -- if all you end up finding in the latter case is your international peers.

He describes a language as an old city, and says very emphatically that what is needed to keep that city in good repair is people, the participation of people and their community. But that is exactly what we don't need in middle and upper class America. We do not have culture. We have structures of power, and culture is surplus to its purposes. The English language as we speak it now seems flat and vacuous because it is not strictly necessary; it is providing no vital function. Tweets and memes are sufficient for us, because almost nothing that matters in the system we live in depends on the skillful, thoughtful use of language. There's no sense in mourning young people's lack of reading habits. Nothing they find in those books will tell them how they might live in the world. The books are no longer necessary to them in a way that they might have been necessary to earlier generations.

This is an overly pessimisstic statement of the situation! And I am only partly Marxist -- I do not believe that it's all down to economics. But I believe we've created a machine, which we live inside of, which requires us to exercise very few of our human faculties in order to sustain its operation. It is no surprise if we start to lose those faculties.

I don't generally have a problem with long-form, but if your article has a title that implies there's an argument in there, I feel like you owe it to the reader to at least give some idea of what that argument is within the first 5 paragraphs.