Poetry: comparing translated versions

[Eric]

I'm carrying this idea over from the Zbigniew Herbert thread:

Why is it that English-speakers (even if born in Germany) can have long-winded debates about the merits of various translations of the same poem - when they can't read a word of the original language?

Obviously, you can see whether the result reads smoothly, even if you don't know the original language. But you can't tell whether the translator is taking huge liberties, merely in order to get his or her translations published. Whether they are ignoring rhyme and rhythm. Whether their interpretation of the vocabulary is accurate or subtle. And so on.

This is much more of a serious problem with poetry than prose, because poetry is often so succinct and compact. And small differences can be much more telling.

[beelzebubbles]

I think it is valid to criticize differing translations of the same work in and of themselves on their merits as literature . But I believe you are correct that the critic should not presume to know which is the closer translation if he/she is unable to read the original.

[Eric]

You can say whether a translation is more grammatical, or "looks nicer" without consulting the original. But ultimately your view can have no value when it comes to seeing how close to the original the translator has got. And it is the original that was written by the poet, playwright, novelist, etc.

I feel that this practice of ignoring the original is prevalent in the English-speaking countries where people love to study linguistics and translation, without even taking the trouble to learn one foreign language. Such an approach can be useful while you are still learning the finesses of a language and can't yet cope with originals, but for it to be used at university level, and by critics, is simply pseudo-intellectual showing off (as I'm afraid Hoffman's comment quoted on the Zbigniew Herbert thread is).

I remember some lecturer at my old university, about 35 years ago, who taught a seminar on Ibsen and Strindberg without knowing any Norwegian or Swedish. Obviously, it is enlightening for someone to teach these playwrights to students who do not possess the language skills, but you would have thought that the lecturer himself should be someone who could read the languages. Otherwise, interpretation will be wholly based on what could be faulty and inaccurate translations. A lot of talk about plays by Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Havel, Gombrowicz, and so on is based on translations that are not checked by anyone. And poetry is, as I have said, a tighter discipline than either plays or novels.

Someone, somewhere, should always be on hand to check the validity of the translation in terms of accuracy. That is one reason that the Bible keeps getting retranslated for religious people to read. Otherwise all you see is the stringing together of those weird and familiar Biblical phrases that everyone pretends to understand and think beautiful and cultural, when in fact they may just be the result of poor translation of the Hebrew or Greek.

[liehtzu]

Even the same translators come up with different versions, as P. Sherrard and E. Keeley show in their earlier and later versions of Nobel laureate George (Georgios) Seferis. The first is from Four Greek Poets, a slim Penguin volume from 1970 (from their terrific, long-gone "Penguin European Poets" series) and the second from the "revised" Collected Poems of George Seferis of 1995:

MYTHICAL STORY

4
ARGONAUTS

And the soul
if she is to know herself,
must look
into the soul:
the stranger and enemy, we saw him in the mirror.

The companions were good lads: they did not complain
either at the labour or the thirst or the frost,
they had the bearing of trees and waves
which accept the wind and the rain
accept the night and the sun
without changing in the midst of change.
They were good lads, whole days
they sweated at the oar with lowered eyes
breathing in rhythm
and their blood reddened a submissive skin.
Sometimes they sang, with lowered eyes
when we passed the desolate island with the barbary figs
to the west, beyond the cape of the dogs
that bark.

If she is to know herself, they said
into the soul she must look, they said
and the oars struck the gold of the sea
in the sunset.
We passed many capes many islands the sea
leading to the other sea, gulls and seals.
Sometimes unfortunate women wept
lamenting their lost children
and others raging sought Alexander the Great
and glories buried in the depths of Asia.
We moored on shores full of night-scents
with the singing of birds, waters which left the hands
the memory of great happiness.
But the voyages did not end.
Their souls became one with the oars and the rowlocks
with the solemn face of the prow
with the channel made by the rudder
with the water that shattered their image.
The companions with lowered eyes
died one by one. Their oars
mark the place where they sleep by the shore.

No one remembers them. Justice.


....................



MYTHISTOREMA

4
Argonauts

And a soul
if it to know itself
must look
into its own soul:
the stranger and enemy, we’ve seen him in the mirror.

They were good, the companions, they didn’t complain
about the work or the thirst or the frost,
they had the bearing of trees and waves
that accept the wind and the rain
accept the night and the sun
without changing in the midst of change.
They were fine, whole days
they sweated at the oars with lowered eyes
breathing in rhythm
and their blood reddened a submissive skin.
Sometimes they sang, with lowered eyes
as we were passing the deserted island with the Barbary figs
to the west, beyond the cape of the dogs
that bark.
If it is to know itself, they said
if must look into its own soul, they said
and the oars struck the sea’s gold
in the sunset.
We went past many capes many islands the sea
leading to another sea, gulls and seals.
Sometimes disconsolate women wept
lamenting their lost children
and others frantic sought Alexander the Great
and glories buried in the depths of Asia.
We moored on shores full of night-scents,
the birds singing, with waters that left the hands
the memory of great happiness.
But the voyages did not end.
Their souls became one with the oars and the oarlocks
with the solemn face of the prow
with the rudder’s wake
with the water that shattered their image.
The companions died one by one,
with lowered eyes. Their oars
mark the place where they sleep on the shore.

No one remembers them. Justice.


.................................

Most apparent at first glance is the soul's transformation from "she" in 1970 to "it" in 1995 (actually this occurred in the first, bilingual edition of The Collected Poems in 1982). A comparison with Kimon Friar's translation of the poem in his Modern Greek Poetry also shows an "it."

What first spurred me to finding the earlier Keeley/Sherrard translations was a comment on Goodreads, where a reviewer of the book spoke of her professor's "disgust" with the new versions compared to the old. I've loved the 1995 edition since I bought it over a decade ago, but there are certainly subtle differences, and others not so subtle, that seem to work in favor of the earlier translations since I've been able to compare the two (there are only fifteen or so Seferis poems in Four Greek Poets). For instance, contractions are far more common in the later versions. In another poem "we have adorned our art so much that its features have been eaten away be gold" becomes "we've decorated our art so much that its features have been eaten away by gold" - the difference between "we have" and "we've" may seem slight, but the voice that comes through in these translations is grand, imposing even (I always think of Orson Welles as the ideal reader of Seferis), a poet of gravitas, and the repeated can't instead of cannot and he's instead of he is gives the later versions a looser tone than the ones from the 1970s. Anyway, it all just goes to show I have way too much free time on my hands these days.

[Eric]

Liehtzu's reply, especially the bit about "she" versus "it", demonstrates something I've been trying to get Beelzebubbles to believe on the Zbigniew Herbert thread: that the original matters a lot, is indeed indispensible.

The translators, in both versions, will not just have changed "she" to "it" at whim, but will probably have been driven by making the choice between a feminine noun which may, to a Greek, have a slight connotion of femaleness, in the way that ships are "she" in rather old-fashioned English, and the neutral "it" usually used in English for things.

Breaks between stanzas differ, unless the cutting & pasting went wrong on Liehtzu's part. I have never seen the reason to use different stanza breaks than in the original, as a poem is non-standard with respect to prose in any language.

As Barbary is an area, I feel that the capital "B" is right.

But once again I state categorically: without seeing the original you can tell very little about the quality of translation. In this case, this means also learning another alphabet as well as being aware of the difference between Katharevousa and Demotiki - which may, though I don't know, make a difference to the tone of the poem, rather like Nynorsk versus Bokm?l. And you have to know something as basic as how many genders Greek grammar has so you can tell whether the "she" versus "it" has any basis in grammar, or is just a translators' whim.

"Unfortunate" women are different to "disconsolate" ones. But again, what is the Greek? That will give the nuance. Other expressions are odd, such as "moored on the shore" and "oarlocks". They had "rowlocks" the first time, a perfectly good English idiom. Why did they change it? Once again, the original will reveal whether the Greek used a calculatedly unidiomatic word to make the things you put oars in stand out more. There may have been assonance or alliteration. But how can you tell whether the translators made intelligent choices without looking at the Greek?

[peter_d]

Interesting discussion!

What I always wonder, when you are a translator of poetry, and you translate something that was already translated, do you study earlier translations before you start with your own, or do you make your own translation and then look at the other version for comparison.

Sometimes new translations are necessary because earlier version have become outdated. Language develops. But in this case of the Seferis translations, the difference is ?only? 25 years. Was the 1970 translation really so bad in the eyes of the 1995 translator/publisher, or had it become so old-fashioned that it needed a newer version?

[Eric]

I personally translate relatively little poetry. But when I do, as a poem is vastly shorter than a three-hundred-page novel, I get out my ballpoint and some sheets of A4 and translate the first couple of drafts by hand. Then type up a neat version on my computer.

The principal thing for me is to understand the basic meaning of the poem, then all the idioms, puns and so on, that might be hidden there. I keep the Muse at bay until I can show her a decent rendering of the basic meaning. Only then do I try to do more clever things and search for synonyms and good phrases.

So the first draft will be fairly wooden and lifeless, with all the alternatives mentioned, and so on. Only once you've got this skeleton or foundation can you afford to start fiddling about with rhyme and rhythm, if there is any (the lack of those makes Herbert relatively simple) and looking for really good words, which you didn't think of when you scribbled down the basic version.

Obviously, feeling is involved, but that is what got you interested in the poet's work in the first place. The draft translation is the work of a craftsman in a workshop, not the excited words of some "genius" standing on a hill in a gale, calling down great things from the heavens. All those people such as Peter Verstegen, Jos Versteegen, Ike Cialona, and the rest of the Tweede Ronde crowd, got their social inspiration by sitting once a week in Mulliner's Wine Bar in Amsterdam (named, incidentally, after a P.G. Wodehouse character). But I can imagine a great deal of wrestling with the texts themselves went on in quiet rooms with dictionaries and so on, during the rest of the week.

[Eric]

And now another point that Peter D mentioned: reading previous translations.

This is a difficult choice. If you read a previous translation, you may already have a solution to the problems involved thrown at you. And once you've seen it, you can't "unremember " it.

So I often translate a poem without looking at the previous translation, until I have at least made an attempt myself. Then I will often look at other translations afterwards. And not infrequently you see things that are a lot better than things you thought of. But some things you wrote will be better than that earlier translation, and not influenced by it.

I don't see any point in retranslating too frequently. There are so many untranslated works that it seems a pity if people keep retranslating the same works decade after decade. But if the earlier translation was bad, then it merits retranslation. I don't feel that the educated version of any language ages very quickly. Older and more elegant expressions can be re-introduced, as long as you don't overuse really archa?c vocabulary, just to sound "poetic".

[Eric]

I've only managed to read half so far, and it is late here in dark Sweden. But the article-writer is humble enough and does examine, at length, and with thoroughness, the various issues involved.

While I would not suggest "ants in my pants" as a solution, what is heartening is that the French words are given, involving ants. Ants are ants, not bees, or tickling sticks, or itches and rashes. So, if the translator can find something elegant and accurate involving ants, then fine, use it.

And as for the use of the imperfect in French, and the repetition of "would" in a tedious manner, well, Davis seems to have used "would" but not mindlessly, in front of every verb. In English we also have the -ing form of the verb to help variation. It is dangerous to take too much notice of Proust's grumble. French has this curious habit, even now, of using the pass? simple in literature for effect, while no one actually speaks like that, as far as I know.

So I'll read it all again and right to the end (I've not got to the Big Fuck yet), before I say more.

[Eric]

Raban says:

We readers of Madame Bovary in English know that we?ll never hear in our own ears the niceties of pitch, tone, inflection, and nuance in Flaubert?s infinitely supple narrative voice as we can hear them in, say, Jane Austen?s. We also know that no novelist has placed so much stress on these qualities as Flaubert, whose painstakingly constructed sentences are as much the ?subject? of the novel as Emma herself. In addition, we?re aware that Flaubert works like a collagist, building an utterly original and perfectly proportioned composition out of worn scraps of language?a language we cannot properly read.

Fair enough. But if language teaching wasn't being decimated, as it has been in the UK over the past 20 years, some British people could actually read the book in French. (I can't speak for the USA as I've never been there.)

To return to the ants, as this man who has his nervous tingle is a farm worker, we do not know whether he was a) just describing the feeling as best he could in his own words, b) using some set phrase that exists in French, or c) trying to use rather upper class French, as he was speaking to a doctor, and was maybe not quite succeeding in getting it right.

When I Googled for fourmis le long du corps it did not strike me that this is a current French set phrase. But it could have been common when Flaubert was alive.

When you think that this is just one phrase, in a 300- or 400-page novel, and when we read that Flaubert uses a collage effect, it does make you wonder how much you miss when you read a translation. And even the original French is from over a century ago.

[Eric]

I quite agree Paul about what a literary translator needs to know, or find out about. You mention knowing 19th century French, things to do with Rouen, and so on.

Just to give you an idea of what a translator has to think about, I personally can only check through and edit about half a chapter per day of the novel I have already translated. The list below are some of the things I need to take account of - and just for this one novel.

I don't have to become an overnight expert, but I need to understand what the Wikipedia, Google, my encyclop?dias at home and other reference works tell me. When the author was alive, he was very kind and helpful. But he's dead. And he was an exceptionally erudite man, not just some novelist who slapped down a load of inaccuracies because of the "feel" of history. So I must bear in mind these things:

- The island of Naissaar, its history and geography, the ethnic mix and the languages spoken there (e.g. Swedish too), and its geographical position relative to the capital Tallinn.
- The German towns of Mittweida and Bergedorf.
- Various things to do with boats, ships and sailing.
- The rise of the Nazis in Germany including names and dates.
- The huge currency inflation during the Weimar Republic.
- Certain technical things from astronomy, including large stellar telescopes, lens polishing techniques.
- A few terms from Czarist Russia.
- The German system of addressing people (e.g. whether to use "Herr" or translate it to "Mr").
- The translator also has to clearly visualise the author's descriptions of landscapes and rooms, so that the translation "holds water", so to speak.
- When the translator is a Briton and is translating for an American publisher, he must be aware of the differences and idiom between British and American English.
- Quotes originally in English or German must be checked.
- A synonym and phrasal dictionary must be available to check rare words.

You will notice that I've not even mentioned yet the language out of which I'm translating the book (Estonian in this case), which must be up to a certain standard. I personally also check against the Swedish translation, and rarely the Finnish one, translations of the book that luckily exist. But you can never rely 100% on another translation. Nevertheless, knowing a couple more languages is handy, so you can see how others tackled problems, albeit into other languages.

And lastly, but firstly, the translator has to have a broad vocabulary in the language he is translating the work into - English in my case. Even today, I must have thought twenty or thirty times whether I'd got the right nuance. And this novel is 300 pages long. So it's a bit different to agonising over a few words in a twelve-line poem as we've been doing with the Herbert!

I gladly compare other pre-existing translations when translating prose, not least because of the sheer volume of things that have to be checked. This is very different to my poetry method, where I avoid any other translation until I've had a stab at translation myself.

[Eric]

The job isn't that hard if you've got a few encyclop?dias on your shelves and know how use Google and the Wikipedia in an intelligent manner.

For instance, there are ample websites on the internet about the German town of Mittweida, where the technical college which is associated with the protagonist of the novel in the early 1930s still exists to this day. And the island of Naissaar, which was used in Soviet times for shooting and bombing practice by the Soviet military, has now been cleared up and they are restoring the Lutheran church that used to be used by the Swedish-speaking community there.

My chief point is that both publishers and readers should realise that literary translation requires intelligence and application, and isn't just a matter of starting at the beginning of the book with a dictionary and looking up words. As well as looking up words, you have to look up the general knowledge aspects of the translation.

[peter_d]

It relates only partly to the original subject of this topic, but I am always wondering how people work together when they are doing a joint translation. In some books I see there are 2 translators. Do you have any experience with translating a publication together with someone else, Eric? Or is there someone else around here who has this experience?

I always wonder:
- do they make their own rough versions and then compare (here's the link with the topic);
- do they just devide the work and then revise each others part to avoid too much of a style difference?
- do they work through the whole thing together?

Hope anybody can share from his or her experience

[Eric]

The idea of translating a book together, like indeed writing one together, is a fascinating subject.

I think that commercial reasons are involved when some quite ordinary crime novel is translated by two people. Simply that the book is split in two, and two human beings are working on half at the same time. So the book will appear twice as quickly.

One thing I nearly always do is have a native-speaker of the source language check through my translation. But then I'm still in control, so to speak, and have the final say as to whether I accept the corrections-suggestions or not.

I think that if you cooperated on a serious literary work, which wasn't being translated merely for speed, you would run into stylistic difficulties. For instance, it would be very hard for a British and an American (or a Dutch and a Flemish) translator to do different parts of the same novel.

Personally, I enjoy workshops and haggling over three pages for three hours. But not too often, as it is quite intensive work. I think having to take another person's style and other foibles into account for a three-hundred page novel could put a strain of the translation relationship, unless you are very symbiotically attuned to the other translator, like members of a quartet have to be when playing a piece of Beethoven.

[Bubba]

I've started Madame Bovary (in French or in translation I can't remember) many a time but not even on my most valorous and determined attempt did I make it more than about two hundred pages in. I liked Sentimental Education well enough and thought the Dictionnaire des id?es re?ues at the end of Bouvard and P?cuchet was excellent, but I would much, much rather read Stendhal than Flaubert. So I sympathize with Davis's view of Madame Bovary.

I suspect she translated this book she herself seems not to admire because she thought she could use the money, and for someone whose stock in trade is words translating Madame Bovary is surely as good a way as any other of pocketing a little cash. I certainly don't think I would translate a book I don't like for any reason other than the money, but perhaps Davis is different.

The ants bit is strange. Avoir des fourmis is simply the most common way of saying tingling in French. In the unlikely event that a translator from French didn't know the expression, the literal translation--I have ze ants all ov?re ze body--would surely make him wonder if it weren't an idiomatic expression and prompt him to look it up. A problem for many translators, I think--one that slows us down--is seeing idiomatic expressions where there are none. Davis, by contrast, seems deliberately to disregard them--or at least this one--perhaps for the same reason--zealotry--that she apparently makes sure to use would + infinitive every time Flaubert uses a verb in the imperfect.

One thing translating has taught me is not to adhere too slavishly to principle, even if it means my translations are not entirely consistent. (A foolish consistency...) I prefer my flexibility to Davis's apparently doctrinaire approach, but I must note that her translations are getting published and mine are not.

Peter D asks about team translations. There's a well known husband-and-wife team that translates old Russian novels into English. The woman, a Russian, produces a fairly literal English version of the book. The man, who I think does not read Russian, then polishes his wife's rough but presumably accurate translation. They are both credited with the translation, but the man is really more editor than translator. As Eric says, books like those in the Harry Potter series are farmed out to a bunch of translators at the same time. That way the translations can be brought out in a few short weeks. One hopes there's an editor to harmonize the whole.

[Eric]

Yes, Paul, you put your finger on it when you mention that the Proust could be translated forever. I once used the analogy before of Plato's Allegory of the Cave (if only Plato had known about cinema projection):

Plato's Cave

Each translation is yet another shadow on the wall of the cave of one particular object - it's not the real thing. The danger is indeed that we regard the translation as the real thing. I keep pulling to bits people's inaccurate and careless renderings of 10-line poems, and readers' na?ve belief that comparing such translations with one another, yet never with the original, is a valid method.

However, when you've got a monumental book of over a million words to tackle, you cannot expect anything in real life beyond the fact that educated translators will keep, time and time again, re-translating, till the cows come home.

As for the title, I think the word "time" and the word "lost" are important, as they're both there in the French; "past", by nuance, is not the same as "lost". But as I said in the previous paragraph, common sense must prevail. Though they could at least get the title close to the original. I am not familiar with exact nuance of the French "recherche".

Bubba also introduces an element of realism into the debate: translators need pay and may hate the book they're doing for the money.

Bubba's last paragraph is what I'm suggesting by symbiosis. A married couple are likely to be attuned to one another's vocabulary, etc. And the fact that hubby can't read Russian is not always a handicap. Two of my exceptionally good editors when I was translating books from Estonian, one Brit and one Brittified Yank, did an excellent job. Because of their experience over the years, they always knew where I was floundering. They may not have known my precise translation problem, but the lumpiness or oddness of language tends to give away the bits you don't understand.

One would rather not speak about Pottermania and filthy lucre.

[Mirabell]

has been called "the obvious successor to the post-modern throne" of Donald Barthelme.

and I still think someone should be punished for so heinously insulting Barthelme.

[Bubba]

I don't think she needs the money. She is a professor of creative writing at SUNY, Albany, received a MacArthur Fellowship ($500,000) and has been called "the obvious successor to the post-modern throne" of Donald Barthelme. She probably doesn't sell many books, but is still in good shape financially. I'm not sure whether I should read her fiction.

Okay, so she evidently doesn't need the money. "For whosoever hath..." Buy why else would she translate a book she seems to profess not to like? Maybe she wants to hitch her cart to a horse unlikely to give out as swiftly as her own. Maybe she didn't have anything of her own to write and wanted to keep from getting rusty. Maybe she doesn't dislike Madame Bovary as much as Raban suggests she does.

I haven't read any of Davis's writing, either, but even if Davis herself weren't well connected in Manhattan literary circles (she's Paul Auster's ex-wife; pity she has to spend all that time in Albany) the encomia recently offered up to her in all the New York magazines would be enough to warn me off. What can I say? I savor my prejudices so much that I'm willing to take the very slight risk of missing out on something I might like. The certain joy I derive from badmouthing the work, which I have no plans to read, of a darling of the New Yorkers like Davis far outweighs, for me, at least, the slight danger of having to admit I'm wrong. Besides, one must take one's pleasures where one finds them.

and I still think someone should be punished for so heinously insulting Barthelme.

Mirabell's posts would be of more use if he expressed his thoughts more completely. Shigekuni seems entirely capable of expressing himself at no little length. Why can't Mirabell do the same?

Why should the statement that Davis is heir to D. Barthelme's postmodern throne be so heinously insulting to the purported sovereign? Does Mirabell think, for example, that Davis is unworthy of approaching King Donald on hands and knees even when His Highness is perched atop his chaise perc?e (that's French for crapper), much less when he is sitting athwart his golden throne and perhaps stroking his knobby scepter? And why, anyway, would a sovereign be insulted by having an inferior successor, especially if his heir's inferiority serves only to underscore his own superiority?

[Eric]

Bubba says:

Mirabell's posts would be of more use if he expressed his thoughts more completely. Shigekuni seems entirely capable of expressing himself at no little length. Why can't Mirabell do the same?

Yes, Bubba, I too have noticed for a couple of years now that the Mirabell-Shigekuni twins are rather schizophrenic in their contact with the outside world. Maybe Shigekuni's utterances are checked by a native-speaker of the fair English tongue, whilst Mirabell, out of sheer pride, wishes to avoid looking like a non-native-speaker, foreigner, other, ?tranger. The propensity to write the pseudo-colloquial "huh" and "wow" all over the place is an equal token of a wannabe English-speaker.

So may Shigekuni, the more loquacious of the two as Bubba suggests, move over to these threads and treat us as peers, and give Mirabell a rest. One of the twins was obviously born an hour earlier than the other, and has thus developed a more mature attitude to comment.

As I have suggested, I fear that the short quips are kept short in a desperate attempt at avoiding grammatical or vocabulary errors. But why this cyber-person so irritatingly refuses capital letters, like a poor man's e e cummings, I cannot tell. He should read other American poets. Emily Dickinson, for instance, threw in capital letters all over the place.

[Eric]

Talking of comparing translated versions, which is the rubric of this thread, I hope that some of you will look at my analysis of six lines of translation on the Ferenc Juh?sz thread. As I say, my Hungarian is rather basic, but with a dictionary and a little goodwill I was more or less able to parse the sentences involved and grasp their meaning.

Despite a great number of emigrants from Eastern & Central Europe during and after WWII to the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the UK, there still seem to be alarmingly few literary translators into English from languages spoken by between a few million people, and forty million or so if we take Poland.

Good prose translators need not necessarily be good poetry ones, and vice-versa. But I hope that, in the English-speaking world, a great deal more focus will be placed on adopting mechanisms whereby translations, especially of poetry, are compared often and, of course, with the original language. This for me is a sine qua non of any comparative assessment of poetry translations, whereas, for practical reasons, you cannot expect the same micro-treatment for voluminous novels.

I cannot help thinking that some courses taught at university level, where CompLit is lauded on principle, but poetry is compared only in translation, are not really scholarly enough. As I hope I am demonstrating, you can soon be misled as to the tone and meaning of a poem, even by the first couple of lines, if the translator has been too free. I feel that there is an uncomfortable tendency to regard poetry as something gushing and emotional which you destroy if you introduce reason and analysis.

This is especially destructive with translated poetry, as charlatans can get away with blue murder in the English-speaking world, where there are few people to check on the value of their work. With large languages, there are often enough people who can point out shortcomings and supply better versions. But with smaller languages, there is a risk that there are simply too few people translating to be able to provide any assessment and analysis.