Different Styles of Translating Novels
A poem like “Jabberwocky” is like an unreal journey around an ASU, hopping from one
state to another very quickly, following very curious routes. The translations convey this
aspect of the poem, rather than the precise sequence of symbols which are triggered,
although they do their best in that respect. In ordinary prose, such leaps and bounds are
not so common. However, similar problems of translation do occur. Suppose you are
translating a novel from Russian to English, and come across a sentence whose literal
translation is, “She had a bowl of borscht.” Now perhaps many of your readers will have
no idea what borscht is. You could attempt to replace it by the “corresponding” term in
their culture—thus, your translation might run; “She had a bowl of Campbell’s soup.”
Now if you think this is a silly exaggeration, take a look at the first sentence of
Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment in Russian and then in a few different English
translations. I happened to look a t three different English paperback translations, and
found the following curious situation.
The first sentence employs the street name “S. Pereulok” (as transliterated). What
is the meaning of this/ A careful reader of Dostoevsky’s work who knows Leningrad
(which used to be called “St. Petersburg”—or should say “Petrograd”?) can discover by
doing some careful checking of the rest of the geography in the book (which incidentally
is also given only by it initials) that the street must be “Stoliarny Pereulok”. Dostoevsky
probably wished to tell his story in a realistic way, yet not so realistically that people
would take literally the addresses at which crimes and other events were supposed to
have occurred. In any case, we have a translation problem; or the more precise, we have
several translation problems, on several different levels.
First of all, should we keep the initial so as to reproduce the aura of semi-mystery
which appears already in this first sentence of the book? We would get “S. Lane” (“lane”
being the standard translation of “pereulok”). None of the three translators took this tack.
However, one chose to write S. Place.” The translation of Crime and Punishment which I
read in high school took a similar option. I will never forget the disoriented feeling I
experienced when I began reading the novel and encountered those streets with only
letters for names. I had some sort of intangible malaise about the beginning of the book;
I was sure that I was missing something essential, and yet I didn’t know what it was . . . I
decided that all Russian novels were very weird.
Now we could be frank with the reader (who ,it may be assumed, probably won’t
have the slightest idea whether the street is real or fictitious anyway!) and give him the
advantage of our modern scholarship, writing “Stoliarny Lane” (or “Place”). This was
the choice of translator number 2, who gave the translation as ”Stoliarny Place”.
What about number 3? This is the most interesting of all. This translation says
“Carpenter’s Lane”. And why not, indeed? After all, “stoliar” means carpenter and “ny”
is an adjectival ending. So now we might imagine ourselves in London, not Petrograd,
and in the midst of a situation invented by Dickens, not Dostoevsky. Is that what we
want? Perhaps we should just read a novel by Dickens instead, with the justification that
it is the corresponding work in English”. When viewed on a sufficiently high level, it is a
“translation” of the Dostoevsky novel—in face, the best possible one! Who needs
Dostoevsky?
Source: Godel Escher Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter
We have come all the way from attempts at great literal fidelity to the author’s
style, to high-level translations of flavor. Now if this happens already in the first
sentence, can you imagine how it must go on in the rest of the book? What about the
point where a German landlady begins shooting in her German-style Russian? How do
you translate broken Russian spoken with a German accent, into English?
Then one may also consider the problems of how to translate slang and colloquial
modes of expression. Should one search for an “analogous” phrase, or should one settle
for a word-by-word translation? If you search for an analogous phrase, then you run the
risk of committing a “Campbell’s soup” type of blunder; but if you translate every
idiomatic phrase word by word, then the English will sound alien. Perhaps this is
desirable, since the Russian culture is an alien one to speakers of English. But a speaker
of English who reads such a translation will constantly be experiencing, thanks to the
unusual turns of phrase, a sense—an artificial sense—of strangeness, which was not
intended by the author, and which is not experienced by readers of the Russian original.
Problems such as these give one pause in considering such statements as this one,
made by Warren Weaver, one of the first advocates of translation by computer, in the late
1940’s: “When I look at an article in Russian, I say, ‘This is really written in English, but
it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.’” Weaver’s
remark simply cannot be taken literally; it must rather be considered a provocative way of
saying that there is an objectively describable meaning hidden in the symbols, or at least
something pretty close to objective; therefore, there would be no reason to suppose a
computer could not ferret it out, if sufficiently well programmed
Source: Godel Escher Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter