Translating cows' names

[hdw]

You meet some funny challenges as a translator. I've mentioned before my technique for translating the names of plants and flowers that come up in this Swedish novel about the naturalist Linnæus that I'm translating. I check the Swedish name in the online version of the big Swedish Academy dictionary, which gives me the Latin name (usually bestowed by Linnæus himself). I then Google the Latin name, which usually gives me the common English name, which I then use in the translation.

Last night I came to a passage where Linnæus, who was rather a weird character, is standing outside shouting out some names, six in all, only one of which I could find a translation for - stjärnros (literally, 'star rose') which in English is the flower known as an 'aster'. I couldn't make anything of the other names, so I Googled them one by one. I managed to get a hit for the word/name fagerkinna, and that was in a Swedish-language text about Linnæus. It told me that the great man was one of the first people of note in Sweden to give names to animals, and he had a cow called Fagerkinna! Ahhh, could the other names be cow-names too? Was that why he was standing outside in the evening shouting them out?

I checked with my author, and I was right. He has helpfully suggested derivations for each word/name in normal Swedish, e.g. that Fagerkinna and Rosenkinna contain the Swedish word kind = Eng. 'cheek' (the side of your face), Gonos is probably from Swedish god nos = 'good nose' or '.. muzzle' (an animal's nose), and Stållsa probably contains the Swedish word stolt = Eng. 'proud'. Frökenstjärna literally means 'Miss Star'. So how to render these into English? We don't tend to give our cows names containing words like 'cheek' or 'nose', so I'm toying with Beauty, Rosie, Velvet (for a soft nose), Proudie and Missie. Aster I'll leave as it is.

Harry

[Eric]

Maybe there are websites in English covering cows' names. It is a challenge for a translator, because what can sound jolly, funny, or familiar in the source language may sound gauche when translated. Cheekycheek would, however, be a nice name for an upstart cowlet. Here's an online dicussion on the subject (scroll down a bit):

http://www.webkinzinsider.com/forum/f151/what-should-i-name-my-cow-171249/

[hdw]

I'm just surprised Linnæus didn't give each cow a tripartite Latin name indicative of her genus, species and family. A bit like Roman citizens:

Gaius (given name)
Iulius (the Julian clan)
Caesar (the family, or clan "sept" in Highland Scottish terms)

Harry

[Stiffelio]

I would leave the cow names untranslated and write a footnote explaining it; those are beautifully sounding names as they are in Swedish.

Regarding the plants' names you are translating, are you also stating their Latin names? Since I'm a plant lover, if I were to read such a book, I'd love to know what the real Linnaeus Latin nomenclature was, maybe in parenthesis or in a footnote, or perhaps by adding a glossary at the end.

Who's the author of the novel?

[hdw]

I would leave the cow names untranslated and write a footnote explaining it; those are beautifully sounding names as they are in Swedish.

Regarding the plants' names you are translating, are you also stating their Latin names? Since I'm a plant lover, if I were to read such a book, I'd love to know what the real Linnaeus Latin nomenclature was, maybe in parenthesis or in a footnote, or perhaps by adding a glossary at the end.

Who's the author of the novel?

In the novel the plants have their homely Swedish names, so I'm only using the Latin names as a way of getting to the equivalent English names. These days when we all have access to the internet you can easily call up images of plants and flowers or find their Latin names for yourself. I'm not keen on footnotes in a novel.

I'm just doing this for fun at the moment, without any prospect of getting the translation published. A few years ago I was commissioned to translate some extracts from the novel for publication in literary journals, and I thought it would be fun to finish it.

The author Magnus Florin succeeded Ingmar Bergman as "dramaturg" of Sweden's leading theatre, the Royal Dramatic Theatre ("Dramaten") in Stockholm, and he is a well-known writer and director in Sweden.

Harry

[waalkwriter]

In the novel the plants have their homely Swedish names, so I'm only using the Latin names as a way of getting to the equivalent English names. These days when we all have access to the internet you can easily call up images of plants and flowers or find their Latin names for yourself. I'm not keen on footnotes in a novel.

I'm just doing this for fun at the moment, without any prospect of getting the translation published. A few years ago I was commissioned to translate some extracts from the novel for publication in literary journals, and I thought it would be fun to finish it.

The author Magnus Florin succeeded Ingmar Bergman as "dramaturg" of Sweden's leading theatre, the Royal Dramatic Theatre ("Dramaten") in Stockholm, and he is a well-known writer and director in Sweden.

Harry

Footnotes are sometimes exceptionally useful for readers of a translation.

[hdw]

Footnotes are sometimes exceptionally useful for readers of a translation.

As Eric will confirm, many translated novels have an introduction or a postscript giving useful linguistic or cultural information, but I think there is resistance to having them at the foot of the page, as in an academic treatise, just as many people object to watching a foreign film with subtitles (although that feeling may be decreasing, to judge from the popularity on TV of Wallander and "The Killing" in the original Swedish and Danish).

Harry

[waalkwriter]

As Eric will confirm, many translated novels have an introduction or a postscript giving useful linguistic or cultural information, but I think there is resistance to having them at the foot of the page, as in an academic treatise, just as many people object to watching a foreign film with subtitles (although that feeling may be decreasing, to judge from the popularity on TV of Wallander and "The Killing" in the original Swedish and Danish).

Harry

I don't know. I think I've broached this topic before, but in many of the online translations of Japanese mangas that I read, (graphic novels of sort, with a unique emphasis on setting and character that makes them much more akin to pure novels than most of what we in the west consider graphic novels), contain translation footnotes which explain a certain pun in the original language, or tell me what a food I've never heard of before is, or give geographic knowledge, etc. It's immensely helpful and not the least bit academic in setting.

Introductions are helpful to, and a good place to put general notes on pronunciations, etc, but there are so many places where in-text references are useful. And footnotes are vastly more convenient than endnotes (as my experience with Jay Rubin's translation of Akutagawa Ryunosuke showed me all too clearly).

[Eric]

To tackle Harry's point in #7: if you don't want to read the introduction, you don't want to read the book. As novels come from different cultures, and aren't just crime novels where the puzzle aspect of who-killed-who is paramount, then the reader might want to know the difference between a novel set in Lithuania, Jersey, or San Marino.

But some people, alas, seem to have adopted an ideological position of: the book must stand on its own. No nannying introduction. By doing that, you would exclude many foreign books. The social system, the current technology, the geography all have importance. When Cees Nooteboom wrote a book called "In the Dutch Mountains", the ironic title would hardly be noticed by people for whom the Himalayas, Nepal, Snowdonia, or similar were the norm.

So moo cows' names must be translated in a sensitive way. There may have to be notes or an introduction, but they must help, not hinder, the reader.

[Stiffelio]

In the novel the plants have their homely Swedish names, so I'm only using the Latin names as a way of getting to the equivalent English names. These days when we all have access to the internet you can easily call up images of plants and flowers or find their Latin names for yourself. I'm not keen on footnotes in a novel.

What I tried to mean was not so much the need (actually my own, because I love plants) to know the exact Latin names, but to be able to visualize the types of plants you are referrring too, as it is not uncommon for a given plant to be given many different common names in Englsih (and in other languages, for that matter), depending on the region or on other habits. So exactly which plant it is is many times hard to pin down. I agree that internet helps a lot.

[Eric]

Yes, the internet is brilliant for finding, for instance, the name of an Estonian plant in English. If the dictionaries don't help for this fairly obscure quest, then the Latin name does. And it takes only a few seconds to key in the Latin name for the Estonian plant and find the English name. Then all you have to do as a translator is to decide whether you want the colloquial name or the rather more formal (semi-) Latin one for the novel or poem you're translating.

[yhmtnxl]

I always want to learn Swedish. The translation of cow's name is interesting.
These days I tried to translate the name of the bonzes，I'm learning now~~