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Translation and its discontentsPosted by Joel Martinsen, October 1, 2007 11:28 PM
![]() Translator and Fudan University professor Jiang Zhihui has been accused of rape. ESWN has the translation of a YWeekend story:
Poor-quality translation is hardly the only problem plaguing China's bottom-line-driven publishing industry, but it's certainly one of the more entertaining. Nitpicking vocabulary and sentence structure is something anyone can do, and some people have even found ways of making it pay. Zhu Naichang, for example, translated E. M. Forster's classic work of criticism, The Aspects of the Novel. Zhu's book, an English-Chinese facing-page version, works as a case study of translation as well as an introduction to the art of fiction writing. It's actually five translations in one—Zhu provides extensive footnotes in which he highlights the less-than-perfect renderings of earlier translators and explains why his version is better. This seems like an appropriate post for a mention of the group blog TransNator (翻疫終結者), which is devoted to outright mistakes in Chinese translations—mistakes that can nearly always be chalked up to the translator misunderstanding the original text (basically what Jiang Zhihui is accused of doing). Try this great post from August for starters—it picks apart the 1999 Chinese translation of William Gibson's Neuromancer. In other translation news, Paper Republic notes that yesterday, 30 September, was International Translation Day, which had the theme "Don't Shoot the Messenger" this year. Does that include translators like Jiang Zhihui who've already committed rape against original works? Or, as those TransNators suggest in a wonderful rant against stilted translationese, maybe we readers should all just kill ourselves first.
There are currently 4 Comments for Translation and its discontents.
Comments on Translation and its discontentsEarlier this year, I was in a meeting with a group of English-Chinese translators, all of whom voiced concerns about the quality of recent literary translations into Chinese. One translator said he doesn't even bother to read translations from the eighties onward because they compare so poorly to earlier translations (from the twenties and thirties, for example). The main culprits seem to be low translation wages and impossible deadlines set by local publishers. Nearly all of the Chinese translators in our meeting complained that they were unable to do justice to their translations in the time alloted by publishers. Books that should take between 4-6 months to properly translate and research are being completed in 1-2 months; this results in clunky and often unreadable translations that sell poorly and disappoint readers. Although the field of Chinese-English translation suffers from some of the same problems (low wages, poor editing at small academic presses, etc.), foreign publisher deadlines are much more realistic. I spent 7 months translating Guo Xiaolu's 100,000-character novel Village of Stone. Howard Goldblatt spent one year on his painstaking translation of Jiang Rong's much longer novel Wolf Totem. It's hard to imagine a Chinese translator being allowed to spend 6 months, much less a year, translating an English, French, Russian or Japanese novel of similar length. The situation is even worse in the world of film. Although Chinese viewers have access to an incredible variety of pirated films - from the latest Hollywood blockbusters to classics by Fellini, Tarkovsky, Almodovar and Kurosawa - the Chinese subtitles are so poor that they obscure the original meaning. It's not just that they are rendered into translationese or riddled with mistakes; sometimes the subtitles are made-up, re-scripted or cribbed from other films. When watching foreign films with Chinese friends, I realize that we are watching two entirely different films. May I say that China is not just lost in transition, but also definitely lost in translation. What an outrageous and misleading first line. The man has only been accused of bad translation. If I was the professor I would be consulting a lawyer. No jo, he really has been accused of literal rape; Joel's only just translated the fact (accurately). |
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