Foreign Literature in Translation.

[Basil]

I thought I would open a thread to discuss attempts, both successful and un, to read foreign language novels and books translated into Chinese.

 

If you’re wondering what the point of doing something like this is, I’ll give three answers, but there may be more:

 

1. It makes higher difficulty works accessible. This rationale is similar to swimmers training  their arms by holding floats between their knees.

 

2. The same work in a different language can lead to different associations and interpretations.  

 

3. Price.

 

My Chinese level is completely unmeasured, so I have absolutely no idea how these books would fit on a hypothetical ’HSK reading list’.

 

3 Dystopian Novels.

 

1984.

 

 

I won’t go over the story. It should be familiar to everyone.

 

This one is the easiest of the three, in terms of language used, progression of the story arc.

 

There is quite a lot of description and not so much conversation, usually the litmus test in terms of second language novel difficulty; but Orwell’s insistence on clear prose makes it much easier than it otherwise could have been.

 

For some strange reason, it’s an interesting novel to read in Chinese: everyone wears blue, eats in canteens, is monitored for thoughtcrime by a ‘benevolent’ government, there are regular wars in vietnam and korea. Whoops. But at the same time, these very things lose some of the shock value that they possess in English.

 

In my translation, some of the terms to describe the gov. set up were a bit weird. I felt that there were much better terms already in use by the CCP…

 

Brave New World

 

 

Again, this story should be familiar to everyone.

 

I decided to read this book because I was surprised when a university educated Chinese friend told me that she had to give up a third of the way through, too hard, too many concepts that she didn’t understand, the story was hard to follow.

 

I can kind of see where she’s coming from.  Huxley struggles to introduce the main protagonist into the story, his chosen method, the novelistic equivalent of switching scenes in Jack Bauer's 24, might be confusing to the unprepared; and some of the issues raised might appear a bit too novel, even if there are signs of it in the world around us.

 

Difficulty wise, there are two humps, at the beginning and by the end. The multiple Shakespeare quotes means that it helps to have some of the plays to hand. I took a break and read the Tempest and King Lear, in English, before finishing up.

 

Less of a headspin than reading 1984 in Chinese, but the focus on needing to conform to the group, the lack of understanding for ‘alone time’ made it feel relevant to my own ‘China experience’. 

 

The translators note at the beginning of the book states that as a mark of respect, and also to not confuse the readers, he intentionally altered most of the names in the book so they didn’t sound like Marx, Lenin etc. 

 

Thanks, I would have struggled with that one otherwise.

 

 We by Zamiatin.

 

 

I had never heard of this book before. It was recommended on amazon.cn when I clicked on BNW. 

 

Apparently it was the inspiration behind both BNW and 1984, and I’m also guessing aspects of Asimov’s robot books and Clarke’s ‘the City and the Stars’ as such it’s an interesting read, if just to see which bits Huxley stole and Orwell pilfered. Written in the early 1920s, it was refused publication in the newly born Soviet Russia and appeared only in translation for the first 60 odd years of its life.

 

I’m about a third of the way through so far. Although I am unfamiliar with the story, I believe it is objectively harder than the other two. Description of the world is rarely without some mathematical term or other. I’d struggle to give a definition of some of these terms in English. The protagonist, starts as a happy cog in a very efficient machine and the story so far relates a series of events that cause the cog to…. well I’m sure you can guess.

 

Chapters are very short and manageable, all written in the form of a diary. Some chapters I have read very quickly, some I’ve had to go at a much slower pace. So if you’re the kind of reader who enjoys looking up words as you read, this style of book is ideal. 

 

The one aspect that makes this book easier than the two above, is that nobody is the story has a name, only a number. Anyone who has ever attempted to read the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book in Chinese and was very confused by names like Dumbledore in characters will know what I mean.

 

I hope the information above proves interesting, or even useful, to a reader or two. If there's interest, I'll update again upon finishing 'We'.

 

 

Is there a spoiler option for posting? I was hoping for this not all to appear as one big wall of text

[quoji]

Murakami 村上春树 has great coverage in China.  Haven't read his books in English but they're great in any language including Chinese.  海边的卡夫卡 and 挪威的森林 are good for name-dropping.  In general, accessing Japanese literature is possible much more in China and I find that pretty awesome. 

[gato]

A major problem with most recent Chinese translation of foreign literature is that they are not done by professional writers.  The pay is too low to make a living on.  I know that the translator of an Raymond Carver short story anthology works as an electrical engineer in Pudong as his day job.  We'll probably never again have the caliber of Chinese translators that we had in the 1930-1950s, when even Lu Xun was doing translation.  

 

For classics whose translations were done long ago, the quality might be more dependable. but recent fiction is likely to be disappointing.  I recently flipped the translation of a story collection by Alice Munro, the most recent Nobel Prize winner.  I am a big fan of Munro, and the translation reads nothing like the original.  The publishing industry in Taiwan is supposedly healthier, and Taiwanese translation might be somewhat better.  I was reading a Taiwan translation of Murakami's "Norwegian Wood".  It wasn't great.  I think I preferred the English translation.   

[simc]

I usually only read a book if I can find a matching audiobook to go with it. I was going to read an Agatha Christe novel in Chinese once, but the audiobook was of a different translation which I couldn't find.

 

If anyone knows of translated novels with matching audiobooks I would be interested.

[imron]

Is there a spoiler option for posting? I was hoping for this not all to appear as one big wall of text

Yes there is.

Just put [ spoiler ] [ /spoiler ] tags around the text you want to hide

[quoji]

My Chinese isn't good enough to be sensitive to quality of translation per se so fair enough.  The Norwegian Wood I have is by 林少华 (shrug).  

OP, there's a "recommend me an audiobook" thread http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/44380-recommendations-for-book-audiobook/ here

[Basil]

Gato

 

I imagine that the publishing industry is losing lots of money through pirated books read on cellphones etc; but I would have thought that the huge increase in English ability across the board would have more than made up for that.

 

I think you are right in saying that you probably have to be a decent writer in order to translate literature well.

 

1984 was published by Penguin, I'd recommend this translation. It read more fluidly than the translation I attempted a few years ago; but then again my Chinese has probably improved in the interim as well. So it's really hard to tell.

 

BNW and We published by 北京燕山出版社，there were a few places in BNW where I'm fairly sure they got it wrong, but again it was mainly just detail.

 

All of these books have been in print for decades, and apart from 'required reading' management books, I haven't read any recently published works translated into Chinese.

 

 

imron,

 

Thanks for the tip.

[realmayo]

the translator of an Raymond Carver short story anthology works as an electrical engineer in Pudong 

I wonder if that's the guy who translated the copy I have. I think Carver's short stories are amazing and reading them in Chinese is fun.

 

Of course in the not-too distant past almost all literati would have worked as electrical engineers or other regular jobs: only the very elite got paid enough for their literary output, the rest had normal jobs and hoped their work unit would give them time off to write.

[gato]

He used the pen name of 小二 for the translations. Is that the edition you have?

I joined a discussion over a translation question on Douban here with him. I attended a book talk he did when the book first came out. He has a PhD in electrical engineering from the US.

See http://www.douban.com/group/topic/8532994/#!/i!/ckDefault

I don't have the numbers, but I have heard that writers (and professors) were very well paid in the 1920-1949 period and could make a comfortable middle class living (unlike today, when one has to supplement with income with other better paying jobs). I'll see if I can find the references when I have time later.

[Lu]

I know a Taiwanese translator who is trying to get into English-Chinese literary translation in Taiwan. From what I hear from him, the pay is bad, the deadlines too tight, copyright falls to the publisher not the translator, the translator has to edit his own work, and the translator remains responsible for any mistakes in the final work. If the translation industry in China is even worse, that is a very good reason not to read good books in Chinese translation, in my opinion.

I don't know if you'd need good writers to make good translations. It's one way of doing things, but in my opinion a slightly different skillset is needed. For writing, you need imagination + good grasp of your language. For translating, you need good grasp of source language + good grasp of goal language, but little to no imagination.

Personally I have several reasons not to read non-Chinese books in Chinese translation:

- You'll always miss out on things that you would have understood in the original (or in a translation into your own language).

- Translated Chinese is often 'translatese' and includes phrases that a Chinese person would never write on their own accord.

- There are many good books that are written in Chinese and are often not translated. If you read those instead, you read natural Chinese sentences and find yourself reading books that you could not otherwise have read (because they haven't been translated).

- And last but not least, apparently Chinese translators get things plain wrong. 'there were a few places in BNW where I'm fairly sure they got it wrong, but again it was mainly just detail', writes Basil. To me that is a pretty serious problem. The very least I expect from a literary translation is that it is correct, and hopefully well-written.

[OneEye]

Agree with Lu about the situation in Taiwan. In my experience, the general attitude about translatese is, "Of course it reads like a translation. It is one. What's the problem?"

[realmayo]

 For writing, you need imagination + good grasp of your language. For translating, you need good grasp of source language + good grasp of goal language, but little to no imagination.

I'm not sure this applies to *good* literary translation. In fact I can't see how you can translate the apparently "untranslatable" without an imaginative and creative use of language which probably exceeds that of most original-text authors.

[Lu]

Well, that's true. But you don't need to come up with the story itself and how to tell it (point of view, order of things happening, etc), is what I mean.

[Silent]

But you don't need to come up with the story itself and how to tell it (point of view, order of things happening, etc), is what I mean.

 

IMHO the problem of writing a good book is not in comming up with a storyline, it's how to write down the details and with translating this still is an issue. Direct translations won't suffice as sentences may have several meanings and the context may refer to 2 or more of those meanings. Cultural references may be a big hassle too as with the change of language there is also a change in target audiences with it's own frame of reference.

 

I once tried to translate a story that I myself had written from Dutch to English. It was a big pain, actually I couldn't.  It was much easier to write a new story about the same events. Essentially both stories told the same thing, but in a completely different way. For a good literary translation you essentially have to write a new story with the same content without the benefit I had of knowing the exact intentions of what was written down.

[Lu]

I once tried to translate a story that I myself had written from Dutch to English. It was a big pain, actually I couldn't. It was much easier to write a new story about the same events.

I've done the same with travel blogs, it was never a direct translation, always a retelling. I wouldn't do literary translation to English, I could do it but not well.

Everyone's milage may vary of course, but personally I'm happy to be a translator and would probably be less happy as a writer. I like wrestling with language, coming up with solutions for ambiguous sentences and sentences that aren't possible or don't make sense in the target language, but the author has done the heavy lifting with regards to the storyline and such. I already know the story is sound, I only ('only') need to make it read well in Dutch. If I were a writer, I would need to come up with the story and make it run smoothly. Not saying that either is more difficult than the other, but it's a different skillset.

[Kenny同志]

Translation is essentially a process of rewriting. In terms of English-Chinese translation, a translator needs to keep himself reminded throughout how the author would write if he were Chinese.

 

These three passages from 余光中's 論的的不休 might be of some interest to you.

 

到 了真正通人的手里，像关系子句这种小关细节，只须略一点按，就豁然贯通了。钱钟书《谈艺录》增订本有这么一段：「偶检五十年前盛行之英国文学史巨著，见其 引休谟言『自我不可把捉』(I never can catch myself)一节，论之曰：『酷似佛教主旨，然休谟未必闻有释氏也』(The passage is remarkably like a central tenet of Buddhism, a cult of which Hume could hardly have heard.——O. Elton, A Survey of English Literature.)（注 8）。」这句话换了白话文来翻译，就不如钱译的文言这么简练浑成。其实无论在《谈艺录》或《管锥编》里，作者在引述西文时，往往用文言撮要意译；由于他西 学国学并皆深邃，所以译来去芜存菁，不黏不脱，非仅曲传原味，即译文本身亦可独立欣赏，足称妙手转化(adaptation)，匠心重营(re creation)。容我再引《谈艺录》一段为证：

拜伦致其情妇 (Teresa Guiccioli)书曰：「此间百凡如故，我仍留而君已去耳。行行生别离，去者不如留者神伤之甚也」(Everything is the same, but you are not here, and I still am. In Seperation the one who goes away suffers less than the one who stays behind)。（注 9）

这一句情话，语淡情深，若用白话文来译，无非「一切如常，只是你走了。而我仍在此。两人分手，远行的人总不如留下的人这么受苦。」文白对比，白话译文更觉 其语淡情浅，不像文言译文这么意远情浓，从《古诗十九首》一直到宋词，平白勾起了无限的联想、回声。也许有人会说不过是一封情书罢了，又没有使用什么 thou, thee, thy 之类的字眼，犯不着译成文言。其实西文中译，并不限于现代作品，更没有十足的理由非用白话不可；如果所译是古典、至少去今日远，也未始不可动用文言，一则 联想较富，意味更浓，一则语法较有弹性，也更简洁，乐得摆脱英文文法的许多「虚字」，例如关系代名词 who，关系副词 when, where, 或是更难缠的 of whom, in whose house 等等。的的不休，不可能出现在文言里。文言的「之」字，稳重得多，不像「小的子」那么闪烁其词，蜻蜓点水，只有半拍的分。你看「赤壁之战」、「安史之 乱」、「一时之选」、「堂堂之师」，多有派头。改成「赤壁的战」、「安史的乱」固然不像话，就算扩成五字的「赤壁的战役」、「安史的乱局」，也不如文言那 样浑成隆重。

 

PS: I may use 法旨, instead of 主旨.

[hedwards]

Like Kenny suggests, translations are really not the same thing as the original. They can still be wonderful stories, but you completely lose out on the subtleties that the original author was bringing into the story. You get the story, the characters and a sense of what's going on, but you lose out on the nuances of the language being used.

 

That's not to suggest that translations aren't valuable, you do still learn things about the culture of the writer and the world the story is based in, but given the chance, you should really always read them in the original language.

 

As far as quality goes, I'd expect there to be another golden age for translations in the future. There's undoubtedly a huge market for translations and when the government gets around to cracking down on the piracy rates, I'm sure there will be more than enough profit involved to make high quality translations worth while.

[realmayo]

Surely some translations can be better-written than the original?

[hedwards]

Not really. The goal of a translation is to convey the original meaning, character and narrative to a new audience. It's not supposed to change things that would have an effect on the quality where possible.

 

What you're thinking of is really more of an adaptation. An adaptation is something where the result may be better or may be worse than the original, but it's not bound to follow the original source text as closely, so you can get variances in the actual quality.

 

In practice, there are going to be variations, a translation can still be masterful and wonderful, but it should really never overshadow the original. It's not the place of the translator to do that.

[Basil]

If you have a story to translate; and in the story are three elves, who all wear pointy hats, two of which glimmer and one of which sparkles; and the elves have books made of birch leaf paper and bound with rat hide in their hands.

 

If you translate it as a story where the hats neither glimmer nor sparkle, and the books are somehow not made of birch leaf paper and bound with rat hide, then you have written a different story.

 

Good translations have to stay close to the source text as is reasonably possible.