Translating measurements

[Eric]

Spontaneously, if you read a novel where the measurements are in Fahrenheit or Celsius (or Réaumur), yards or metres, gallons or litres, miles or kilometres (or versts), acres or hectares, how would you react?

The metric standard is international, especially in science, but I believe that in the USA, the older forms of some measurements are still preserved.

So when you come across aberrant forms of measurements, do you accept them or get irritated? (I seem to remember that Waalkwriter once told us that British spellings of certain words irritated him.)

This is by no means an abstract problem for me personally, because a novel I've just translated involves this international conundrum.

[Loki]

Spontaneously, if you read a novel where the measurements are in Fahrenheit or Celsius (or Réaumur), yards or metres, gallons or litres, miles or kilometres (or versts), acres or hectares, how would you react?

The metric standard is international, especially in science, but I believe that in the USA, the older forms of some measurements are still preserved.

So when you come across aberrant forms of measurements, do you accept them or get irritated? (I seem to remember that Waalkwriter once told us that British spellings of certain words irritated him.)

This is by no means an abstract problem for me personally, because a novel I've just translated involves this international conundrum.

I don't see how one could get irritated. For me it would be yet another occasion to try and learn a kind of measurement which is not used in my country: "yet another" because I've already tried but I always end up forgetting everything about it.
Anyway, while a little endnote would suffice, I think it would be better to convert all the instances when the measurement is not clear to the common reader.

I remember sometime ago I attended a presentation of a novel, translated by a young translator (she had just got her master's degree in translation of post-colonial texts), in which she explained just this, that she preferred to "translate" the degrees from Fahrenheit to Celsius (but also something else I guess) instead of maintaining them as in the original.

[hdw]

Sometimes a term from the original language may be left untranslated for a touch of exoticism and local colour. I'm sure I've read many translations from the Russian or novels set in Russia that use the word "verst" (Russian верта).

For those of you who don't know, 1 verst = 500 sazhen!

Harry

[Eric]

One solution, I suppose, is to have a conversion table at the back of the book, because if the novel is historical and set in Thailand, Nova Scotia, or Russia, they might well use odd measurements. I agree with the couleur locale idea for the flavour of the novel, but if you're talking about a farm, and they use hectares or "tunnland" instead of acres, with which you are more familiar, you might want to know whether this is a big farm or a smallholding.

A verst (versta in Russian, as Harry mentions) is evidently 3,500 feet, or 1.06 kilometres. With this minimal difference to kilometres, one footnote at the first mention would suffice to say "approximately a kilometre" for Europeans. But for Britons and Americans who want it in their scale, I think 3,500 feet would give no sense of distance. It would have to be in miles.

And it took me a decade or two before I "felt" the Centigrade (i.e. Celsius) temperature, as opposed to the Fahrenheit one. Now I only think in Celsius. When it's very hot, it's 35 for me, not 95 degrees, or whatever the exact equivalent is.

[Bubba]

Measurements are sometimes tough. Versts, as Harry mentions, are often found in English translations of Russian books, but then why are the more familiar kilometer, Celsius, hectare, kilogram, and so on so often converted to mile, Fahrenheit, acre, and pound for American audiences? We're not that stupid. Of course, there's not much poetry in the metric system. "Sorrow Hectare," anyone? "And kilometers to go before I sleep"?

In a book I recently translated, I kept all measurements in the metric system--if they were in the metric system in the original Italian. But the book had lots of farmers who used archaic measurements, from before the widespread adoption of the metric system. One of them--giornata or "day"--posed a bit of a problem. A giornata is roughly the amount of land an ox can plow in one day, as is an acre. So, for the archaic giornata I simply used the perfectly current (at least in the US) acre. The exact meaning is the same, but the nuance is lost. Another frequent measurement was the quintale. I debated translating it into pounds (around five hundred, I think) but ultimately went with quintal, which is in fact an English word.

[Eric]

Yes, this is where the translator can agonise and writhe. You can translate tens of thousands of words, and then be confronted with a conundrum like this one. It's a question of the feel of the text, and how important the ethnic measurements are for that feel.

[Howard]

As a translator from French, Italian and Spanish for both the UK and US market, I find different publishers have different rules about this. Some (especially but not exclusively American) ask me to convert all metric measurements in my translations, while others are quite happy to keep the original kilometres, litres, Celsius, etc.