Do we still need literary translators?

[Eric]

I hope that I have demonstrated on three threads: one about Finnish texts translated by Google Translate, plus reviews of books by A S Byatt and Stephen Fry, that the world is still a long way away from the stage where you can pick a book that looks interesting, press a button, and get an instant translation of novel, whether it is 250 or 900 pages long.

Literary translators are hardly noticed in the rough and tumble of the modern international literary world. But if you look at the Fry and Byatt translations of the reviews (not even the books themselves!), you will see that you can hardly make any sense out of them and have to grope your way towards some sort of meaning.

So next time your read your Nabokov, Gavalda, Pessoa, Kehlmann, Strindberg, Gadda, Eliade, Paasilinna, Mahfouz, Lispector, Borges, Walser, Witkiewicz, Mulisch, Machado de Assis, Oz, Neruda, Rodoreda, Ibsen, Bolaño, and a thousand other writers, remember that you simply can't yet rely on a machine to bring the world of literature, from beyond the English language, to you.

[Aldawen]

I absolutely agree with you on the need for literary translators. I'm much indebted to many of them otherwise missing even more interesting books than I do anyway. That's why I got used to name the translator as well when I present a book I've read to others e.g. in a forum. Apart from the idea to pay my respects to this profession thereby it's also interesting to see how you got accustomed to certain translators for specific languages over the time – even with translations between rather common languages (as - for me - English and German) where the number of translators is very large.

[Hamlet]

My respect for translator's and translation only increases. Reading translations early on, they were invisible people but I respected the accomplishment, now it's teasing or often important and maddeningly pedantic even to consider, 'which translation' and the problems of the translator's art, "faithful or accurate" or "to the letter or the spirit". The latest translation of Don Quixote I've been reading (and meaning to finish the last 200 pages of for weeks and weeks.... ) opened up my appreciation as I saw the use of Brit slang, Shakespeare, turns of phrase that are clearly not Spanish, and with Sancho's thousands of proverbs the effort and skill was there, and so should the praise be: it's incredible how many approximations the translator is using to get it across to a Brit or American reader.... esp. the humour.

I had this discussion once with a writer pal from NYC who was an assistant to a famous Proust Scholar, and it nearly bolied over when discussing which translation, bolied over meaning being told what to read; since then I'm aware of differences of approach, rather than 'best' translation, but it's odd when someone getS so passionate and certain about the 'right translation'.

[Eric]

My postings of things translated by the Google Translate machine from Finnish (i.e. reviews of books by A S Byatt and Stephen Fry) should demonstrate adequately that machine translation, though a wonderful burden-saving idea, isn't there yet when it comes to both vocabulary and syntax. Why I chose Finnish is that it is the language that I know which is the furthest from English when it comes to word order and syntax. And the machine fails to cut the sentence down into blocks of meaning, then spew out the words in some adequate way so that you actually read something you can understand. Both reviews end up incomprehensible.

Here is a short sentence in Finnish about a Turkish / American author from a review from April this year:

Elif Shafak (s. 1971) on Ranskassa syntynyt ja osan vuotta Yhdysvalloissa, osan Turkissa asuva kirjailija, joka tarttui rohkeasti tabuun.

The machine translation you get is:

Elif Shafak (b. 1971) is born in France and part of the year in the United States, Turkey, part of a writer who bravely took the taboo.

The name at the beginning and her date of birth are clear enough, but the vital word that tells you that she lives part of the year in Turkey, part in the USA is missing from the sentence, already causing confusion. That word is "asuva" (living) which appears relatively late in the sentence from an English-language point of view. But it should not simply be missed out. The reader must be baffled by the suggestion that she is born part of the year in the USA. Already we have complete nonsense. Of course the reader can guess intelligently, but if you have a text about war or something drastic, you don't want pidgin translation.

The sentence can be analysed as follows:

Elif Shafak (born 1971) is France-in born and part of-year USA-in, part Turkey-in living writer, who seizes bravely upon taboo.

As you can see, there is no word for "in" in Finnish. The Finns simply stick the letters -ssa on the end of the word instead. As the word "living" (asuva) is so far away from "osan vuotta" (part of the year), the machine quite cavalierly misses the word "living" out altogether. And the wrong attribution of the second "part of" to the word "kirjailija" (writer) instead of "vuotta" (year) leads the poor reader even further down the garden path. In the end you've just got garbage.

A rough human translation is:

Elif Shafak (born 1971) was born in Fránce and lives part of the year in the USA, part in the United States, and seizes bravely upon taboo (or taboos).

That very last clause is a bit hazy because Finnish uses the verb "tarttua" which can mean to sieze, grab, etc., and has to be reshaped a bit in English.

And that's just one sentence. If you've got a postmodernist novel that is about 100,000 words long, you've got a lot more words to translate.

[RamonaQ]

This may be a bit off topic, but at the moment here in Croatia there's a heated discussion going on in the literary/translation community about the quality of a translation of poetry from Russian to Croatian that has just been released. Apparantly, the translator missinterpreted certain words and thus changed the meanings of lines and verses. So although Google translate may be good enough for you to be able to read the article criticizing the translator's work since you don't know Croatian, in no way is it good enough to translate a poem, let alone a novel.

[Eric]

I can't read Croatian but I would prefer to read a French, German, Dutch, or Swedish translation, rather than try to interpret the garbage that Google Translate can turn a text into. It's a tricky machine because if you glance at the text in the translated version, it seems to make sense. But on closer analysis most of it is incomprehensible rubbish, especially from lesser-known languages. When I tried to read something that Google Translate had "translated" out of Finnish, I found it easier to try, with my imperfect Finnish, to read the original than trying to guess at the what the Google Translate version actually meant.

So, I think that we literary translators are still in business. Being born in France and part of the year in the United States (as with Elif Shafak; see a previous posting of mine here) is an interesting exercise in surrealism, but not helpful if you want to find out about the author in question.