Literature: Lost in Translation?

Lost in translation?

All 15cm rulers are manufactured with a tolerance of error for 0.5 millimetres, meaning that when you measure the side of a triangle with your ruler, there will always be that 0.5mm (0.3%) difference between the scale of your ruler and the scale on the ruler belonging to the person sitting next to you. But what is 0.3% in the grand scheme of things? Does it really matter? Surely, such a small difference will not be significant enough to throw off your whole trigonometry calculation. This is what we call tolerance of error. An error so small that we can tolerate the inaccuracy without devastating impact on the final outcome. But are there times when this tiny discrepancy does make a huge difference, when that 0.3% margin of error drastically changes the end result? I would argue that when it comes to the translation of Literature, this margin of error can a have deep and profound impact on the meaning of the original source material.

Some discrepancies of error in translation are harmless enough and merely serve to define something slightly more or less accurately than originally intended. For example, in Vietnamese, there is no way to distinguish between the colours of blue and green, both are known collectively as 青: ‘blue.’ Meanwhile, the Turkish language distinguishes between paternal aunts (hala) and maternal aunts (teyze), whereas no such specifying option exists in English. These differences fall inside the 0.3% tolerance of error, they may mean that reading a book in Vietnamese or in Turkish is slightly different from reading the same text in English, but this difference is so small that it can be tolerated: it doesn’t change the key values and intrinsic message of the text, just as tiny differences between the scale on your ruler and somebody else’s won’t change your final calculations.

Yet there are cases where the translation of a text poses more significant problems in terms of maintaining the original meaning of the source material. One key example is the novel ‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue. This text is narrated by Jack, a boy who has grown up in a single room after his mother was abducted and imprisoned. For Jack, the objects in his room are the defining characters of his life and he personifies them as such. For example: “we’ve been making labyrinth since I was two, she’s all toilet rolls insides taped together in tunnels that twist lots of ways.” On an immediate level, Jack’s narration poses a problem for grammatically gendered languages that categorise the noun labyrinth as masculine, for example French (le Labyrinthe). In French, it would be impossible to maintain Donoghue’s prose, as the masculine noun ‘labyrinth’ would have to take the masculine pronoun ‘he’ (il) as opposed to the pronoun ‘she’ used in Jack’s original narration. However, on a deeper level, the normality of gendering objects in languages such as French, Spanish and German, takes away some of the strangeness of Jack’s development that Donoghue aims to convey. Whereas a reader of the English text would see that Jack’s lack of exposure to the outside world has caused him to develop a more than usual connection to the objects around him, personifying them due to a lack of his human contact, this element of the book is missing for readers in languages that naturally personify and gender objects on a daily basis. Some of the intrinsic meaning of the source material has been lost in the 0.3% margin of error.

Another example of the problems caused by grammatical genderization comes in that most famous of American novels: ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Harper Lee deliberately chooses an androgynous name for her protagonist,‘Scout’, and works hard to confuse her reader as to Scout’s gender:“I swear Scout, sometimes you act so much like a girl, it’s mortifyin.’” Scout’s gender does not begin to be truly defined until the visit of her Aunt Alexandra, who takes on the mission of transforming her into a ‘girl’, encouraging her to wear dresses and to drink tea with other women. Scout’s discovery of her gender and transition into 1960s womanhood is one of the defining themes of Lee’s novel, and yet it is missing from some translations of the text. In the English version of the text, the reader completes the same journey as Scout herself, not knowing her gender in the early pages of the narrative, where it is left unspecified in Lee’s use of pronouns and prose, and then discovering it through the feminising dialogue of Aunt Alexandra. However, in a language such as Russian, concealing the gender of a person is grammatically impossible. This is because verbs, such as ‘bought’, change depending on the gender of the person who completed the action: ‘купил’ meaning bought when in reference to a male, and ‘купила’ when in reference to a female. Even if Lee tries

to hide the gender of her protagonist with a non-genderspecific name, like ‘Scout’, in the Russian version of the text, one would not be able to write the sentence “Scout bought a book” without specifying her gender in the conjugation of the verb ‘bought’. Therefore, Russian readers are denied the chance to discover scouts female gender as she works it out for herself. Is it really the same book? Or, has that 0.3% of difference changed the source material too much to be considered tolerable?

The question of whether Literature sometimes becomes ‘lost’ in it’s translation, is even more complex when we apply translation to older texts, such as Shakespeare. To enlighten us further on the translation of Shakespeare in particular, I turned to Dr Marianne Hewitt who has a PHD in Argentine Shakespearean Performances 1976-present from Queen’s University in Belfast.

WHAT LED YOU TO STUDY THE TRANSLATION OF SHAKESPEARE/ WHAT IS IT THAT INTERESTS YOU IN THIS FIELD?

Dr Hewitt: Since I studied King Lear for my AS Levels, I’ve thought of Shakespeare as another language. My teacher had to explain whole sections and it took a lot of time for the class to work out what the words meant in the context. Usually, we would all come up with different understandings of ‘what Shakespeare meant.’ We often relied on the notes added by the editor to understand some of the words, I felt like I needed a Shakespeare – English dictionary. So, I was very interested in this question: if Shakespeare is difficult for English speakers to read, how do non-native English speakers manage? Do they read it in English, and have the same problems that I have, but multiplied, or do they read it in their own language? And if so, how can someone translate ‘Sirrah’ or ‘junket’ into another language when it’s not really clear what the words mean to begin with?!

Another obstacle in understanding Shakespeare is that, over time, the meanings of words have changed. ‘Brave’ for Shakespeare means ‘handsome.’ When Shakespeare said ‘honest,’ we would say ‘pure.’ ‘Young,’ to Shakespeare, is ‘recent’ for us. On top of the time-difference, there are also Shakespeare’s many metaphors and grammar games (such as turning verbs into nouns and nouns into verbs), all of which adds to the amount of deciphering required in order to understand the meaning. When you see the plays on stage, there are lots of visual and verbal cues to help you to contextualise, for example, in Henry IV I and II, when Falstaff talks about ‘sack,’ he is often drinking wine, and in King Lear, when the Fool says ‘nonny,’ he’s using a singsong, silly voice so it’s more apparent that ‘nonny’ doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just a filler word in his song.

ARE THERE DIFFERENT METHODS FOR TRANSLATING SHAKESPEARE, OR DO MOST TRANSLATORS FOLLOW A SIMILAR PROCESS?

Dr Hewitt: The method of translation depends on the translator’s background, politics, audience, aims, and more. No two translations of a play would ever be the same as each other. You could give two writers the exact same instructions: ‘Rewrite a well-known children’s story’ – keep the same plot, the same characters and the same vocabulary. Both versions of the story would turn out to be different. Now, imagine if you’d told the writers the same thing, except this time, they had to rewrite a well-known children’s story for an adult audience. The results would be even more different, because each writer has a different idea of what an adult audience would enjoy - maybe one version would be humorous and one version would be dark. Now, imagine that the writers were told to rewrite the children’s story for an adult audience, except, this time, one writer was from a city in a cold climate that had recently suffered a bombing and one writer was from an island with a hot climate with diverse wildlife and plants. The two stories would likely look very different because the writers have very different influences and contexts. For example, imagine if the writers were rewriting ‘The Little Mermaid’ and they came across the word, ‘shell.’ For the writer from the bomb-blasted city, they’d be more used to thinking of a ‘shell’ as a projectile, so it’s likely that the story would become more violent, whereas the beach-based writer would be more used to thinking of a ‘shell’ as a seashell or even a coconut shell, which would make for a far more gentle plot.

Now, applying this to Shakespeare makes translation even more complicated, firstly because Shakespeare’s plays are ambiguous, which means that everyone who sees Shakespeare will have a different understanding of ‘what Shakespeare meant.’ Secondly, plays are particularly difficult to translate because the translator has to consider how the words will sound on-stage, as well as whether they can be understood when written. Thirdly, the translator has to think about whether they want the end result to sound like it was written in the 1400/1500s – some countries didn’t exist then, so is that even possible? Finally, an added challenge with Shakespeare is Shakespeare’s cultural weight. A translator has to consider what Shakespeare means to the audience. For example, should Shakespeare be written in a way that is respectful, shows that Shakespeare is British, should it show that Shakespeare is from the Early Modern era?

ARE THERE ANY PLAYS, OR MOMENTS IN PLAYS THAT YOU ACTUALLY PREFER IN TRANSLATION? MAYBE THEY BENEFIT FROM SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT SHADES OF MEANING THAT DON’T EXIST IN ENGLISH?

Yes! Omkara, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, is the story of Othello, set in India, with some fantastic music and songs. Haider, by the same director, is also a brilliant, crime/ action movie version of Hamlet. Seeing Shakespeare in translation makes you realise that ‘Shakespeare’ is just a name we give to some really good stories. I think the hardest question is; ‘what makes it Shakespeare?’ Films are a great way to think about Shakespeare differently and to understand that there is no single or right way to understand Shakespeare. Lots have people have seen Shakespeare films without realising. For example, She’s the Man, 10 Things I Hate About You and The Lion King are all Shakespeare in translation. I’d recommend thinking of a country and typing the name of the country and ‘Shakespeare’ into Youtube – there’s an endless amount!