Erase personal profile and all posts.

[OneEye]

Goldblatt got it exactly right, except for the part that his translation is it's a perfectly good sentence that nobody is going to misunderstand and have a discussion about :-)

Maybe he should have. Sometimes when I'm translating, if the original is really vague or ambiguous, I'll try to make my translation equally unclear. It can be fun.

However, I'm doing one right now that was written by artists and designers (not that there's anything wrong with that?), and parts of it read like a stream of consciousness full of design-related buzzwords and devoid of any real content. Sometimes it seems like I've gone hours without seeing a period. My tactic has been to read the whole paragraph a few times, let the general feeling sink in, then throw the whole thing out and write what they're really trying to say. They seem happy enough with it so far.

[skylee]

Re #41, that is if you know what they are trying to say, or if they are really trying to say something.

[OneEye]

Yeah. Like I told my boss, it may be full of 廢話, but at least it's mostly the kind of 廢話 I'm familiar with, having spent a lot of time around artists and musicians. Some of it truly is nonsense though, even my Taiwanese friends read it and scratch their heads.

[Lu]

However, I'm doing one right now that was written by artists and designers (not that there's anything wrong with that?), and parts of it read like a stream of consciousness full of design-related buzzwords and devoid of any real content. Sometimes it seems like I've gone hours without seeing a period. My tactic has been to read the whole paragraph a few times, let the general feeling sink in, then throw the whole thing out and write what they're really trying to say. They seem happy enough with it so far.

At one translation job I had, we at the translation desk were called 编译 rather than 翻译, we didn't only translate the words, we also amended where necessary to make the piece fit the stylebook. I'm now doing Han Han's blogs, the meaning is often clear enough but sentence structure is sometimes a bit hard to find. So I'm polishing it a little bit, but I'm probably going to have to defend or change some things that don't look that great in Chinese either.

And translators really are the closest readers of a text. Sometimes you're reading something that seems sensible enough and only when you start translating it you realise that it doesn't actually say anything.

[tooironic]

Lu, when you say you are "doing" Han Han's blogs, do you mean you've been commissioned to translate them, or you're just doing it in your spare time?