I’m sure most everyone is at least somewhat familiar with people who think that translations must be as literal as humanly possible. That the only way to truly bring across the meaning is through a literal translation.
Such people are the largest bane on translation there is. Second is people who don’t know what they are doing.
Why is this such a horrible thing? Because it sounds so reasonable. A just plain bad translation, when discovered to be bad, is put aside. A literal translation that is ‘good’ will be clung to for its literalism.
Now, this is not to say that there good things to knowing what a literal translation of a word or sentence or paragraph is. In fact, such is a very, very good thing because the connotations of the words chosen may bring forth new levels of understanding.
However, a block of text may have two meanings. What the words themself literally mean and what the concept the creator may be trying to get across. This is abundantly clear with regards to idioms. A stitch in time saves nine does not mean a stitch in time saves nine. It means that fixing a small problem may save a lot of work in the future when the problem is much larger. It need not have anything to do with stitches at all.
Why do I bring this up now? Well, I was looking at this discussion about how to deal with a little snafu in the fan translation of the Suzumiya Haruhi novels. Note: these are real novels here, not graphic novels or some such.
What was this snafu you may ask? Well, one of the translators took a line and translated such that it bore basically no similarity at all to a literal translation of the line. It was a nifty little trick the guy pulled, and it worked.
In the resultant discussion someone made the comment: “i voted the way i did since i believe translation projects should remain faithful to the author’s original meaning and context.” This person was talking about voting in favor of retaining a more literal translation of the original text.
Now I shall speak on the problem with this. A literal translation of the line would actually kill the ‘original meaning and context.’ In this piece of text the speaker was asking a question that had a metameaning of, “I have no idea what you are talking about. Clarify.” What he said, literally, was “Organization? How do you write the kanji for that?” Or, due to the fact that English doesn’t use kanji, “Organization? How do you spell that?”
The problem here is that in the first case organization does not use kanji and to understand the real meaning of the phrase you need to know what kanji are, their usage in Japanese, and that Japanese is chock full of homonyms. So, what the speaker means is, “I have no idea what you are talking about. Clarify.” In the second case it just makes the speaker look like a retard and doesn’t make any sense in context. In fact, to get at the meaning here you have to have an even better knowledge of Japanese than in the first case.
Now, to explain how the Japanese sentence works to transmit the meaning of blahblahblah, clarify. The Japanese word for organization used here is pronounced ‘kikan.’ Several words are pronounced that way. The person speaking doesn’t know what is being spoken of so he asks what kanji are used to make the word kikan which will then tell him what word is being used.
Here’s the problem. No English translation for the word kikan has a homonym that would work. What did the translator do? He kept what the sentence meant and changed the specifics of what was said to stay true to the meaning. What he used was, “‘The Agency?’ As in ‘Central Intelligence Agency?’” What he did was change the question from ‘what word’ to ‘what agency’. He used the word agency instead of organization as all. It keeps the meaning of blahblahblah, clarify. However, as can be seen, it doesn’t resemble a literal translation.
From my point of view, his translation was far more true to the original spirit than a literal translation would be.
Now, as one person pointed out in the discussion, this isn’t a religious text where the words chosen can have very deep significance. It’s a light sci-fi novella. Major changes are acceptable because of lack of importance. Dumping literalism in favor of meaning is good in this case because nothing of import is going to be lost. Things where word choice is vitally important do not have the same liberty that light reading does.
I was going to talk about computers, but I want some Louise and ice cream. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow for my computer rant.
