Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What makes a translation great?

scroll.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 85 posts

Re: What makes a translation great?

#61

Post by 082349872349872 »

dri_ft wrote: post #59
082349872349872 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for more detail: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... of which the most relevant is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24208047 What's your explanation of why Pound went Fascist? Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3C3nfF3SMA

>for more detail: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu ... Oh, I see. We actually discussed Pound about four years ago - just a little back and forth about the ABC of Reading : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196681 >What's your explanation of why Pound went Fascist? I'm not sure I particularly have one; I haven't read any of his longer political or cultural (i.e. non-literary) works. I…

Maybe I put my comment poorly because what I wrote 4 years ago is still in my head. I had had a working hypothesis that xenophilia is antifascistic. (how about comedy? Fascism produced "Lili Marleen", but did it produce any comedians?)

My big Q was: if Pound was such a xenophile (as I had thought) when young, why did he turn to Fascism when older?

TIL that he wasn't ever xenophilic; he only dealt with the other once it had been transmuted into the familiar and he could work it on his own terms. (thus restoring my working hypothesis)

Does that make more sense?

Thanks for your answer!

As to his potential conclusion that fascism ("tomorrow belongs to me") was the answer to "western decline", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24696859

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yybY0QeZdro

Re: What makes a translation great?

#62

Post by wolverine876 »

philipov wrote: post #54
wolverine876 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that in other places too. I fear it reduces the films to the level of camp. Do the directors not think it matters? Do they not have easy access to fluent speakers of English?

It takes more than a fluent speaker to write good literature. And that's the rub - you need someone who is themselves capable of writing good literature, regardless of whether it's original or a translation of an existing work.

The errors I'm talking about could be fixed by any fluent speaker.

Re: What makes a translation great?

#63

Post by Detrytus »

cafard wrote: post #26
haunter wrote: post #4

>A good translation wants to be read So much this. For example I think a lot of people would actually enjoy Iliad and Odyssey more if their first experience weren't in dactylic hexameter.

Who translated the Iliad and Odyssey into (English) hexameters?

Is there even such a thing as "English hexameters"? From what I remember from high school hexameter is based on the feature of the Greek language having both "short" and "long" vowels, which is then used to create a particular rhythm. My mother's tongue does not have such feature which makes it impossible to make real hexameters in it. Translations do not even try to imitate it.

Re: What makes a translation great?

#64

Post by lampiaio »

adelie wrote: post #34
wkjagt wrote: post #16

I feel that I am very sensitive to "translations sounding like translations". A feeling of "that isn't quite how a native person would say that, but I can't really identify what's wrong". My mother tongue is Dutch, and the strange thing is that with the strong influence of the English language, even a lot of content written in Dutch today sounds like it was translated from English. I find it really hard to explain it…

'translationese' is a pretty common term for it. when you translate, it's really easy to mirror the source structure/syntax even when there's more idiomatic ways to say it in the target language.

Exactly. One simple example that I see all the time comes to mind:

In English, "dozens of ____s" is a very common expression, particularly in news articles. In my local language, even though we do have a word for "dozen", it's much more common to say that in the form of "tens of ____s". Most of the "dozens of ____s" I see written in my language are from news articles that were (badly) translated from English.

Re: What makes a translation great?

#65

Post by sapphicsnail »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #3

The objective of a translator should be to retain the spirit of the original, and have the translated piece stand on its own two feet as a work of literature. This is why Ezra Pound and Christopher Logue were such good translators. Pound translated into English the Analects of Confucius, a bunch of Noh Plays, and many other works of Chinese and Japanese literature. But he was barely capable of reading Chinese or Japa…

There is no perfect translation. Different translations have different aims and that's ok. I love Anne Carson's translations of Sappho but I always give the caveat that she takes a lot of liberties with Sappho when I recommend it to a friend. Having a more literal, dry, translation is fine too.

Re: What makes a translation great?

#66

Post by sapphicsnail »

nataliste wrote: post #31
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #3

The objective of a translator should be to retain the spirit of the original, and have the translated piece stand on its own two feet as a work of literature. This is why Ezra Pound and Christopher Logue were such good translators. Pound translated into English the Analects of Confucius, a bunch of Noh Plays, and many other works of Chinese and Japanese literature. But he was barely capable of reading Chinese or Japa…

I stumbled upon War Music after discarding (almost) every other translation of the Iliad because the translators cleary didn't get it. Sure, they could talk about Homeric epithets for days and knowingly reference the "wine dark sea," but the actual ethic and humanity of the Iliad eluded them. And when you do get those aspects (as Logue did), the actual choice of idiom by the translator becomes irrelevant, whereas if…

As someone who can read Ancient Greek, Homer is unlike anything we have in English. No translation can "get it." It's oral poetry meant to be performed for hours at a time with a bunch of repetitive stock phrases. I don't feel like I "get it" reading it in Greek. It's absolutely beautiful but even when I read it in Greek, I feel like there's this huge gulf between me and the context it which it was created. I think you should just choose whatever translation you find beautiful but there's also value if someone wants to read something that's worded more closely to the Greek.

Re: What makes a translation great?

#67

Post by soundnote »

SunlitCat wrote: post #32
soundnote wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The translations in anime at least are unlikely to actually be worse, since a lot of the English anime translation industry are obsessed with inserting woke politics and cringey zoomer jokes into their translations and more or less hate the people who buy their products. There's a reason a lot of people are laughing at the activist translators losing their jobs to AI. In areas where the translators are actual, respon…

Although your comment is unnecessary strongly worded, you raise some very serious points. Especially Japanese - English entertainment media translations, it is very often pretty apparent that there is some kind of agenda behind translation of such works (even with translators admitting it them self doing so in comments / messages on different social media platforms). Something I just wonder is, why does especially th…

I don't think Japanese translation is all that well paid, and if people don't get money from their work, they'll go for the job for other forms of payment (eg. status), or extract payment in other ways (half-assing things, being a petty tyrant like reddit mods, etc.)

Re: What makes a translation great?

#68

Post by soundnote »

082349872349872 wrote: post #61
dri_ft wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>for more detail: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu ... Oh, I see. We actually discussed Pound about four years ago - just a little back and forth about the ABC of Reading : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196681 >What's your explanation of why Pound went Fascist? I'm not sure I particularly have one; I haven't read any of his longer political or cultural (i.e. non-literary) works. I…

Maybe I put my comment poorly because what I wrote 4 years ago is still in my head. I had had a working hypothesis that xenophilia is antifascistic. (how about comedy? Fascism produced "Lili Marleen", but did it produce any comedians?) My big Q was: if Pound was such a xenophile (as I had thought) when young, why did he turn to Fascism when older? TIL that he wasn't ever xenophilic; he only dealt with the other once…

I don't know if that works out: A lot of people on the right I know are quite xenophilic in the sense of having a deep interest in other cultures etc, though not indiscriminately so.

The difference between them and much of the left is that they've come to reject oikophobia as wrong and are consciously oikophilic when it comes to their own culture and ethnicity, while the leftist configuration is oikophobic/xenophilic.

(Not to say there aren't oikophilic/xenophobic people, but I feel like that's more often an unthinking stance)

Re: What makes a translation great?

#69

Post by 082349872349872 »

soundnote wrote: post #68
082349872349872 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I put my comment poorly because what I wrote 4 years ago is still in my head. I had had a working hypothesis that xenophilia is antifascistic. (how about comedy? Fascism produced "Lili Marleen", but did it produce any comedians?) My big Q was: if Pound was such a xenophile (as I had thought) when young, why did he turn to Fascism when older? TIL that he wasn't ever xenophilic; he only dealt with the other once…

I don't know if that works out: A lot of people on the right I know are quite xenophilic in the sense of having a deep interest in other cultures etc, though not indiscriminately so. The difference between them and much of the left is that they've come to reject oikophobia as wrong and are consciously oikophilic when it comes to their own culture and ethnicity, while the leftist configuration is oikophobic/xenophilic…

That's an interesting hypothesis; what would be some examples of oikophobia?

Re: What makes a translation great?

#70

Post by autumnstwilight »

soundnote wrote: post #27
pjc50 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, speaking as a Japanese-American who has done amateur translations (anime fansubs) at one point, being a translator is terrible; the absolute worst thing about it is that the work is thankless. Whoever reads your translations simply can't appreciate quality I'm surprised that you feel that way, because I've always associated the anime community with caring very strongly (not always correctly, but always…

The translations in anime at least are unlikely to actually be worse, since a lot of the English anime translation industry are obsessed with inserting woke politics and cringey zoomer jokes into their translations and more or less hate the people who buy their products. There's a reason a lot of people are laughing at the activist translators losing their jobs to AI. In areas where the translators are actual, respon…

As someone who can understand both languages, it's less that the translators are obsessed and more that the gamergate-adjacent crowd has decided to drag their culture war into anime translations. There are a handful of examples where the translation could be debated and a lot more where it's actually pretty accurate and tonally consistent with the Japanese (which is often not exactly high literature itself), but some guy armed with a Japanese 101 textbook and Deep-L wants to get an internet mob going about it because he's convinced that someone with a trans flag in their Twitter profile can't possibly be doing it right, or that Japanese creatives themselves couldn't have left-wing/pro-LGBT views.

See: people getting mad about the word "LGBT" appearing in the English version when the Japanese version also literally said "LGBT".

Post reply on HN