What makes a translation great?
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Pound translated into English the Analects of Confucius, a bunch of Noh Plays, and many other works of Chinese and Japanese literature. But he was barely capable of reading Chinese or Japanese at all. He was provided with rough word-for-word translations by friends like Ernest Fenollosa, and he translated those into literature.
Logue didn't know any Ancient Greek, but his rendition of a part of the Iliad is probably the greatest achievement of late 20th century poetry. He simply re-worked the (many) existing English translations into something more lyrical and contemporary. In effect, he reinterpreted the existing body of translations -- and, in his own way, heightened their effect, and captured much of the spirit of the original.
I find that most translations -- especially of poetry -- tend to be altogether too mechanical. Pound and Logue had it figured out.
Homer's world is very alien to ours. I realized at one point, reading the Odyssey, that it is myself who didn't get it. There was a chasm between me and Homer, and if I wanted read and understand Homer in a meaningful way, I was going to have to cross it.
Unless I have personal expertise, how can I evaluate who 'gets it', Logue or others?
1) contract/legal/diplomatic translation: capture the meaning as exact as possible, even if that means the translation is boring and double, or even ten times the length of the original.
2) literary translation: translate to keep things interesting and engaging. EVEN where that means changing the meaning, order, ... of things. Making some changes to accomplish that can be acceptable, for example changing the behavior of a polite character or a policeman or a person of authority to match expected behavior for those kinds of people in the target country. Matching the structure of the original text is just not a concern at all.
The translation itself should be a literary work. Obviously not separate from the original, but not 100% the same either. 95% the same, with the remaining 5% providing maximum "flavor".
3) educational translation: depending on the level of the reader, evolve from literal translation, even putting the words in the wrong order for the target language just to match the original text as closely as possible, or leaving some words untranslated. Slowly evolve towards more "interesting" translation. In any case keep the structure, sequence and word use of the original text 100%.
4) conversational translation: translate as quickly as possible, for example not waiting for complete sentences to start translating. Try to get feedback going between both speaker and listener, as the purpose is having them communicate, not having exact translation, or interesting translation. Just translate 5 words at a time, even when they don't form complete sentences.
If I want to read inspired Ezra Pound or Christopher Logue, that's the way. If I want to read Confucius, I get a lot of Ezra Pound mixed in, and in a way that is impossible for me to distinguish one from the other. The same goes for wanting to read Homer and getting a lot of Logue.
(For Confucius, Arthur Waley was both leading translator and poet, and Waley's translations are highly recommended for their knowledge of the original and their English poetry.)
To that I would recommend the translation of it by Red Pine (Bill Porter), not only is is a wonderful translation but it does so much to add additional context via others commentary on the chapters through out the ages.
of which the most relevant is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24208047
What's your explanation of why Pound went Fascist?
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3C3nfF3SMA
Oh, I see. We actually discussed Pound about four years ago - just a little back and forth about the ABC of Reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196681
>What's your explanation of why Pound went Fascist?
I'm not sure I particularly have one; I haven't read any of his longer political or cultural (i.e. non-literary) works. I just think it's silly to correlate an approach to translation that you dislike with fascism. Especially as I'm not sure it even makes sense on its own terms: I can only read your comment as 'lazy translator? Figures that he would be a fascist', but if I imagine the type of translation a fascist would approve of, the approach I picture is fastidious, fussy, concerned with fidelity to the point of stickler-ishness. (Isn't that from where we get 'grammar nazi'?)
And oh, well, since you ask I'll take a shy at it: my vague sense is that he became fascist because saw a society in decline due to it becoming more and more a sham society: opulence without virtue, power without vigour, money no longer tied to actually existing goods. (Of course, all of this shades easily into antisemitism.) He saw fascism as the answer; It's easier to see in retrospect that it wasn't.
My big Q was: if Pound was such a xenophile (as I had thought) when young, why did he turn to Fascism when older?
TIL that he wasn't ever xenophilic; he only dealt with the other once it had been transmuted into the familiar and he could work it on his own terms. (thus restoring my working hypothesis)
Does that make more sense?
Thanks for your answer!
As to his potential conclusion that fascism ("tomorrow belongs to me") was the answer to "western decline", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24696859
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yybY0QeZdro
The difference between them and much of the left is that they've come to reject oikophobia as wrong and are consciously oikophilic when it comes to their own culture and ethnicity, while the leftist configuration is oikophobic/xenophilic.
(Not to say there aren't oikophilic/xenophobic people, but I feel like that's more often an unthinking stance)
There's a lot - all the "Death to America" rhetoric, white liberals being okay with other ethnicities openly advocating for their interests but whites doing so being gigabad. Generally refusing to act in the best interests of existing citizens vs. even illegal immigrants, or refusing to uphold laws out of care for the supposedly downtrodden with the result that cities turn into shitholes. celebrating old achievements of their own civilization being cringe, while celebrating those of other cultures' being lauded.
This does not mean the white liberals don't act in their own interest - their policies wrt eg. black schooling are some of the most heinous works of sabotage you could imagine, but the cloak it as compassion. More graduations and admissions, but less people able to actually read or do math.
What would be oikophobic if people in cities were to do their own shithole urban thing, and you all were to do your own non-shithole non-urban thing?
* https://www.theonion.com/relatives-acting-like-they-ll-be-as...
Lagniappes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYNSSkOOTBk & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MoIGGIK8XY
[0] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-the-bbc-censuring... They also commissioned a ten-minute preface talk by Mary Beard but as I couldn't watch this myself (it's only on the BBC iplayer for which I will not sign up) I shall refrain from comment.
As a lagniappe (not a word we have in my country, by the way), I share this rather cruel Pound story which may nonetheless, as it did me, amuse you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auberon_Waugh#Waugh.27s_views (2nd paragraph, or look for 'Pound')
Bron's father's prose from Brideshead rather sums up (with the necessary change in brackets) why I may come across as oikophobic at times:
> ...we had been through it together, the [Old Country] and I ... until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively ... I learned ... the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying.
(it is reassuring to see in WP that the elder Waugh's second marriage, like his second confession —despite Vatican II?—, stuck for life)
EDIT: looks like many "BBC Four Classic Documentaries Collection" programs of the last century get the same treatment, from:
(1961) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00lgzyl
to:
(1995) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05tjt61
> Programmes are selected, in part, for their historical context and reflect the broadcast standards and attitudes of their time, which may not accord to some current BBC editorial guidelines. We aim to select programmes which can be shown in their entirety but in some cases edits are required.
I'd assume nudity wouldn't be a problem in context, either then or now, but transverberation content like The Ecstasy of St. Teresa may run afoul of contemporary self-harm guidelines?
Fair enough, it may be that the warning is just a generic one slapped on all their old repeats, but I do think that commissioning a new ten minute introduction from Mary Beard is going above and beyond. I haven't seen it so didn't want to speak too much on it, but from what I gathered it's a mixture of measured praise and blame for Clarke's eurocentrism.
>I have Civilisation in hardcopy
It's a good series, I would recommend it if you haven't already seen it. (My biggest gripe with the BBC rebroadcasting it is that it prompted them to take down from youtube the copy I was in the middle of watching!) By the way, for a more xenophilic production of similar scope, you might wish to take a look at The Silk Road[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silk_Road_(Japanese_TV_ser...
(note that it's not always easy being parochially oikophilic if your sympatriots[0] sometimes say things like "no, where are you really from?". Oἶκος strictly speaking referred to the family[1]; some people consider their οἶκος[2] to be less, others, more, inclusive)
[0] did latin pick up patria from greek or are they cognate?
[1] so pedantically "home ec" should be unmarked and "national economy" the marked term.
[2] presumably "kith and kin" is not redundant; which class is larger?
> Men are cruel, but man is kind —RT
Lagniappe: https://xkcd.com/2608/
Seeing other cultures as something to be studied or understood is something even the xenophobic can be drawn to, if nothing else to size up the enemy (see all of the "studies" done by the Nazis on the "untermenschen")
So they are self-first, but interested in and appreciative of those who are different. They just wish to stay themselves, as well. You can see it in eg. the architecture accounts on Twitter: They'll readily post Islamic architecture, Asian architecture and those people's local solutions to their environmental issues, but they also insist European solutions and culture be accorded at least equal value. And a lot of the people running them certainly don't want millions of Islamists on their shores, their appreciation is less for modern Islam and more for the old golden ages when they were a center of high civilization.
The left doesn't think the first desire of their own place as it used to be is valid, of caring for themselves first is valid, but they do like other cultures (or at least the injection of foreign influences into their own, which they have a dim view of). The left, while it accords primacy to the other over what's traditionally their people's, don't really look up to foreign cultures in some ways - they do try to change them to be western woke leftist in character in their interactions, even if they hold them in higher regard than the culture of the leftists' native countries.
(I'm failing to see the how we get to "in effect say they don't have a right to their own place". My understanding of the leftist position is that everyone has a right to their own place.)
(I'm all in favour of people's freedom to swing their fists about, as long as they're avoiding other peoples' faces)
When I read translated texts (or watch dubbed films) I always catch false friends or awkward translations, and I "see" the original through the translation like it was a leaky abstraction. It's so tricky even the pros make a lot of mistakes.
In Italy a “pepperoni” pizza is translated as “pizza ai peperoni”, which is “bell pepper pizza”
In English, "dozens of ____s" is a very common expression, particularly in news articles. In my local language, even though we do have a word for "dozen", it's much more common to say that in the form of "tens of ____s". Most of the "dozens of ____s" I see written in my language are from news articles that were (badly) translated from English.
I often find myself having started a sentence in Dutch that I can't finish without borrowing something from English, and I remember a recent example actually involved the word "dozens" (although I forgot what the sentence was about so I can't reproduce it here). That sentence should have been constructed entirely differently, but I now use English in my day-to-day communications at work, at home, and also most online ones so some stuff slips through.
It blew my mind some months ago when I used an English saying, perfectly translated (no loan words, good sentence structure), but entirely nonexistent in Dutch. I can't ever have heard anyone said it but it came out without any thought. The person I was talking to is also proficient in English and understood what I meant, but whether or not their face gave something away, it took me five seconds to realize what I had said. I guess the brain stores words in a form of meaning that transcends language, and just calls upon the language neural net to convert that into muscle movements for speech? Actually, no, then you'd have gotten the word-for-word translation; it must be storing more than single words in some sort of language lookup center, or maybe something that converts between the two structures if you do enough translating between a given language pair? Either way, mind-boggling stuff
Exectly the same thing happens to my native language. What causes it? I guess the overwhelming viewership of English spoken to control, so people actually start thinking in English, and translate their thoughts badly when they need to express themselves in their native languages.
I dislike translation notes. Translations are already a form of notes, so appending notes to notes is just bad form.
Some translations can be so awkward or simply impossible that leaving a translation note becomes inevitable, but a good translator should not have to need them everywhere.
One example. In LOTR there is a hobbit named Meriadoc, but his friends call him Merry, which is a shorthand for his name but also carries meaning. In one translation into my language, the translator opted to translate Merry into "Srečko", which is close in meaning. The connection to the original name is lost and the translator put that in the translation notes to explain that there is a connection. The rest of the book(s) then always use the semantic meaning. I found that solution to be great for the given problem.
Later translations didn't opt for that, instead keeping the shorthand, which would be just "Meri", which is a nice shorthand but completely drops the semantic meaning.
Worse still is there might not be a "correct" way. Like in your example, one preserves the context while the other preserves the name. I'm sure we can agree both of them are critically important, but we (probably) can't have both of them.
Translating is a grueling job.
All according to *keikaku*
(TN: keikaku means plan)
Neologisms: do you mean neologism in the source language or the target language? This usually happens in the other direction, where the English words for things get copied straight over to other languages to refer to new items. There must be examples in the other direction but I can't immediately think of one.
A good translation is one where the "good" in the original comes through. That might be a concept, a story, or even the rhythm of the words. Great books especially have _many_ good things that a translation needs to handle. Translation is hard because sometimes translating a "feel" might come at a loss of the clarity needed to express an idea.
I like what Emerson said about it in "Books"
> What is really best in any book is translatable, – any real insight or broad human sentiment. Nay, I observe that, in our Bible, and other books of lofty moral tone, it seems easy and inevitable to render the rhythm and music of the original into phrases of equal melody.
The readers? The only thing that makes a translation great for them is whether the translated text reads well. Whether the translation is accurate to the source material is irrelevant; the readers literally can't tell and don't care, that's why they are reading a translation!
The publishers or whoever hired the translator(s)? The most important thing for them is speed of translation, how many words per minute. Accuracy and reading well are secondary to speed. Time is money.
The translators themselves? Depending on whether these are amateurs translating out of passion or professionals translating for a living, what makes a translation great is going to be either accuracy or speed (time is money!) respectively.
Personally, speaking as a Japanese-American who has done amateur translations (anime fansubs) at one point, being a translator is terrible; the absolute worst thing about it is that the work is thankless. Whoever reads your translations simply can't appreciate quality, and if you're translating for someone for hire there are usually more pressing concerns over quality.[1]
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/dnpzrh/everyone...
As a professional translator, I cherish those readers. They have the good sense to trust me to do the technical part (understanding the original) and only criticize the artistic part (producing a beautiful derivative work).
The worst readers are the ones who have some knowledge of the source language, and rush to nitpick the technical decisions without considering the artistic ones. They are the literary equivalent of those "fans" who will watch a stunning film adaptation and then go home to complain about the colour of Gandalf's shoes or the width of a sand worm's molars. Ultimately, readers of this type are all ego, more concerned about being right than about whether the work is good.
The very best readers, of course, are knowledgeable in both languages and understand that "equivalence" goes far beyond what is written in the dictionary. But as you say, they don't need the translation!
I'm surprised that you feel that way, because I've always associated the anime community with caring very strongly (not always correctly, but always strongly) about the translations. Hence the fansubs in the first place. It's only really a thing for anime in the first place; there aren't many people fan-translating Spanish telenovellas or Kdramas into English, for example.
> Accuracy and reading well are secondary to speed. Time is money.
Looks like AI will accelerate this tendency. We'll get more, cheaper, but worse, translations. Which I see as a qualified good, since it means more amateur and "long tail" from other languages can make it to the English Internet.
As I came to find, most watchers simply couldn't care. How could they? They don't know Japanese! They certainly appreciated anime, but they couldn't appreciate translating and I won't blame them for not appreciating what they don't know.
Of those who did care, though, most of them judged translations for all the wrong reasons and usually without realizing. Kind of a similar vein to how most ham radio guys know enough electricity to be dangerous but not enough to be useful.
All in all I found the work was ultimately a thankless one and I burned out real bad after serving as a translator for a couple animes.
But the fansub group I was with were a great bunch, and the flame wars I had with other translators in other fansub groups were awesome. Flame wars between passionate people who know what they're talking about are a sight to behold.
In areas where the translators are actual, responsible professionals, the quality will suffer.
Especially Japanese - English entertainment media translations, it is very often pretty apparent that there is some kind of agenda behind translation of such works (even with translators admitting it them self doing so in comments / messages on different social media platforms).
Something I just wonder is, why does especially this niche part of this profession (translating Japanese entertainment media) attract people doing so and even let them admit to make it more culturally appropriate for western markets?
It's really an interesting phenomena.
Hell, the distribution of Japanese entertainment across the world is in large part a Japanese government agenda[1] for diplomatic ends.
It's all politics.
See: people getting mad about the word "LGBT" appearing in the English version when the Japanese version also literally said "LGBT".
this is also why the fansubbing scene is effectively dead - companies like crunchyroll get episode scripts early and can thus release subs simultaneously with the official release. most fansub groups now just fix/edit the crunchyroll script, if they even pick up series at all. there's no point in putting in the effort if no one's going to look at it, after all.
that's the main issue i have with 'more but worse' translations, honestly. you'll get more material, but the good translators won't just move to content that wasn't translated before - they'll just disappear entirely.
On the contrary, readers generally read a translation because they want to read a specific work, and/or experience the culture it's part of, but can't or won't spend what it would take to become fluent in the language themselves. If they just wanted to read something that reads well they wouldn't be reading a translation. So accuracy is something they care deeply about, even - especially - if they're poorly qualified to assess it.
> being a translator is terrible; the absolute worst thing about it is that the work is thankless. Whoever reads your translations simply can't appreciate quality
Well, yes. It's like sound design, or colour grading, or stage magic; when you do it right, the audience doesn't notice that you've done anything at all. It certainly takes a certain mentality to thrive in.
So much this. For example I think a lot of people would actually enjoy Iliad and Odyssey more if their first experience weren't in dactylic hexameter.
One warning: among the genuinely deep insights, Hofstadter can occasionally come off as smug and self-congratulatory about his own poetic genius. I found this rather off-putting - and surprising since I found the tone of G.E.B. rather more like enthusiastic play.
I have a bit of a sense of this having learned a couple of languages enough to be aware of what's lost in translation, and examples of good and bad translations.
https://mwichary.medium.com/seduced-shaggy-samson-snored-725...