Translating Englishness

[Eric]

Somewhere in the novel "England, England" by Julian Barnes, he gives a list of fifty words or short phrases associated with England and Englishness. These are clichés, to be sure, but they would provide a useful list for translators into other languages. Because it's not just the words you translate, but all the cultural baggage. A translator from English into another language would have to know at least a little about the things on the list. It is too long to reproduce in its entirety, but here are some of the fifty points:

2. Big Ben / Houses of Parliament
4. Class system
7. Robin Hood and his Merrie Men
8. Cricket
10. Imperialism
18. Thatched cottages
19. Cup of tea / Devonshire cream tea
21. Phlegm / Stiff upper lip
25. London taxis
30. Double-decker buses / red buses
33. Perfidy / untrustworthiness
34. Half-timbering
37. Winston Churchill
42. Whingeing
43. Queen Victoria
46. Emotional frigidity
48. Flagellation / Public schools
50. Magna Carta

You get the idea. I feel that this list is a good check list for someone who, for instance, wants to translate books by very English authors such as Arnold Bennett, J.B. Priestley, D.H. Lawrence, A.S. Byatt, and so on, cutting across class and time, but referring to characteristics of English people-

Barnes' list is certainly tongue-in-cheek, but would be a valuable aide mémoire for a translator.

 

[Eric]

I'm not replying to my own, unread thread, but adding to it. The thought struck me, when thinking about Trollope, as an author that Sirena has brought up elsewhere today, foreign translators are often spoilt with 19th century literature. There are notes to help modern readers in most editions of novels by Dickens, Thackeray, George, Eliot, Trollope, and so on, as we 21st century beings, even the Britons amongst us, do not know everything about 19th century life, including housing, education, transport, schooling, and various institutions such as the church and the poorhouse.

But someone from abroad translating somewhat newer literature, e.g. Bennett, Priestley, Lawrence, or Byatt, as mentioned in my first posting here, and even other more contemporary authors like Bennett, Amis, Coe, Ali, Smith, Larkin, Hollinghurst, Barnes, etc., etc., would not have the benefit of footnotes or endnotes, and would have to do a lot more Googling and other research to find things out about the very English, sometimes regional, aspects of such novels.