Thursday, November 18, 2010

On translation

I once wrote a essay in French called C'est comme ca chez nous ("That's the way it is here"). It read like a short story but it was a factual (or at least as much as my memory would allow) account of something that happened to me in the Peace Corps in Guinea. I wrote it in French because it was easier for me, since the events happened to me in French.

At some point, I decided to translate it into English so I could share it with friends and family. That was a revelatory experience.

Much of it was straight forward but other parts of it were difficult. Writers are, by our nature, perfectionists, always striving for exactly the right word or phrase. Even a simple French word like etranger, did it mean stranger? Foreigner? Outsider? Any of those could have worked in my piece. They are all similar but with slightly different nuances depending on context. Which one was the *right* one? I was the author and I struggled greatly with this.

And it really made me appreciate the work done by translators of literature, as well as those of things like political documents and the like. When I translated my account, it was only 7 pages long. It was written in ordinary, contemporary French. And most importantly, I knew exactly what the author meant, what was going on in his head, because I was the author.

If I had that much of a challenge translating my own brief work, from a modern foreign language into my native tongue, how hard must it be for those translating someone else's work? Let alone the work of someone who is no longer alive to consult regarding intent. Let alone someone writing in an ancient version of a foreign language that's barely recognizable today.

In many ways, a translated work is almost as much the creation of the translator as it is of the original author. Except the translator doesn't really get much credit for that Herculean task. Just the small exercise of translating my own brief work made me appreciate that.

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