My wife just picked up a John Grisham novel and Thomas Friedman’s “The Earth is Flat”, both in Chinese translation. I’m glad she’s reading good books, but I would prefer if she were reading them in the original English – not just because it would be good practice for her, but because I can’t help but believe the translations are inferior to the original.
Grisham and Friedman, to name just a couple of examples, are not truly “great” literature, but they’re very talented and entertaining writers and I suspect a good deal is lost in translation. Especially with mass-marketed, huge volume books such as those, targeted for mainstream, general consumers, I would think, the Chinese publisher looks for good translators who can do a decent job, meet deadlines, accept the lowest sum possible, but they do NOT insist that it come out a brilliant work of art in Chinese.
But I have no idea. I can’t read Chinese characters and don’t know the commercial publishing translation process. Thanks for enlightening me.
I read English lit in translation every chance I get (I find that I’m small-minded enough to enjoy Western literature more, but I like to read in Chinese when I have the time to read for pleasure). I read the first few Harry Potters in Spanish and am on number 5 now in Chinese, and find the translation pretty good. I’ve never read one in English though so I can’t compare directly. I have Chinese versions of non-fiction works like “Civilisation” as well and find them generally fairly well translated (at least insofar as I can give an opinion not being a native Chinese speaker and not comparing the translation line for line and word for word.)
Reading in translation is great for vocab, though (Harry Potter is a gold mine; they talk about what they’re going to do all the time, so you can see how the expressions are used in casual speech instead of having that ‘yeah but can you say that’ feeling). Way back when when there was far less “great literature” translated into Chinese, I got my hands on some Harlequin Romance equivalents, which were very good for expressions not commonly taught in class. (I remember that was where I learned the word for ‘zipper’, for example…not to mention the verb for ‘tremble’, which seemed to be rather overused. But I digress. )
Generally speaking, they do farm books out to those willing to translate for low word rates, but probably to complete as large a volume as a book in the first place, and to do it before the deadline in the second place, most of the translators are probably going to have a pretty good level of English before thinking of taking on a project like that. Usually the things that are not translated well are more like fine nuances, unfamiliar expressions and double meanings and so on. Some of these might be better translatable given enough time, but in commercial translation there isn’t always enough time to make things really nice.
I’ve got the Da Vinci Code in Chinese for my next book, but I’m not getting through Harry Potter 5 very fast as I don’t have much free time these days, so I can’t comment on the translation of other books.
The quality varies greatly but there are some very good translators out there. Some do it for love–the remarkable Lucifer Chu completely and brilliantly re-translated the Lord of the Rings into Chinese. Others like the woman who did Harry Potter are chosen precisely because they can really render a big money book like HP into readable and fun Chinese. I suspect that if your wife is reading and enjoying them, they can’t be all that bad. The Da Vinci Code would be an excellent test case. How do you say ‘gnostic’ in Chinese? And the question I have been wondering about is how readers in a place where people don’t understand the relationship between Protestants and Catholics follow something like this? The translator must be doing a decent job.
All in all, translations are a tremendous window on worlds we will would otherwise never see. Even if the window is a bit dusty a times.
Ironlady’s reading habits raise another interesting question, at least for me. I never read Chinese translations from other languages on the grounds that their syntax and vocabulary are overly influenced by Western languages. Also because they are generally poorly written and I can read them in the original anyway. But perhaps this is just being narrow-minded. What should students of Chinese be reading anyway and how would one test this quantitatively or qualitatively?
Anything translated by Guo Nai Jia (assisted by her wonderful husband—me) is sure to be very well done. (look for Aristotle’s Children, or the Man Who Invented Time—both non-fiction through)
Oh, oh, now I am a bit worried however. The talk has turned to the Da Vinci Codes. Elizabeth and I were two of the ghost translators on that. Because the publisher was in a super rush to get that out the named translator (a friend of my wife’s) subcontracted part of it out to us. My contribution, such as it was, was my background in western religious studies (my major at university was philosophy, my minor was religious studies). So I was in charge of explaining all the nonsense weirdness in the book. Although oddly enough I did not read the book! But I did get started in the Freemasons once so I know all about the secret handshakes and shit.
It is kind of interesting that, that book should come up right now. Just last night Liz and I ended up spending about a hour on a real religious phrase:
Peace on earth, goodwill towards men
Which at this Christmas season no doubt strikes a chord. Well it turns out that the Roman Catholic Chinese bible and the Presbyterian Chinese bible have the final phrase (goodwill towards men) translated differently. And—the problem is a two level problem because there are two different Greek phrases used in different manuscripts of Luke. Some use a Greek phrase that implies:
Goodwill towards those men whom God favors
Others use a phrase that drops the final clause (whom God favors).
So what to do. Being Irish I simply told my heathen wife, write whatever the Catholic version says and when we get criticized simply respond with: “The Pope says it says yadda, yadda, ya”.
Translations are matters of faith. (just kidding, those kind of statements maybe some kind of sin)
An elderly French/English/Vietnamese translator I met years ago in Vietnam told me: “Translations are like women. The more beautiful, the less faithful…”
I can only comment on Children’s books. My Chinese isn’t all that good yet, so that’s about all I’m reading. I teach some private students the “Magic Treehouse” series by Mary Pope Osborne. In Taiwan you can buy them with the English on the one side and the Chinese on the other. I read the Chinese portion and it’s failry accurate. Then again, it’s a fairly basic series of books aimed at readers of about 7 - 10 years old, so it’s obviously not very complicated. However, that said, it still flows very well in Chinese…
I had a laugh when my wife said to me that John Howard, Australia’s Prime Minister, always wanted to be an undertaker as a child. I wondered where she picked up that bit of weirdness and she said in Bill Bryson’s “Sunburned Country.” It turns out that Bill Bryson’s sardonic comment about Howard having the personality of an undertaker was translated as him always wanting to be an undertaker.
One of the problems facing Taiwanese translators is that the major Taiwanese publishing companies are starting to look east to mainland China where you can get translations done for pennies on the dollar so to speak.
Of course how well books are translated from one language into another depends not just on the abilities of the translator, but on the abilities of the second language to convey what’s expressed in the first.
I’m only a beginner at Mandarin, but I get the impression English has a lot more complexities and subtleties than Chinese (look at tenses for example), so that English allows a skilled writer to express ideas more precisely, accurately and, where desired, employ more subtle secondary meanings, tones (not in the pronounciation sense), plays on words, etc., so that no matter how skilled the translator, some well-written English works simply cannot be translated into Chinese (more so than the other way around). Is that true?
[quote=“Fox”]I had a laugh when my wife said to me that John Howard, Australia’s Prime Minister, always wanted to be an undertaker as a child. I wondered where she picked up that bit of weirdness and she said in Bill Bryson’s “Sunburned Country.” It turns out that Bill Bryson’s sardonic comment about Howard having the personality of an undertaker was translated as him always wanting to be an undertaker.
Now, I hope I’ve got that right myself.[/quote]
Oh I so hope that is right. Does she think he is some kind of sick bastard?
But I think that is true of any translation. Does that mean we disregard say Russian or French novels in translation?
I recall Joseph Conrad, who wrote that book recently updated for the modern times, “The word between m and o of the Narcissus,” once said he preferred to write in French but was commercially better off writing in English.
HG wrote [quote]I recall Joseph Conrad, who wrote that book recently updated for the modern times, “The word between m and o of the Narcissus,” once said he preferred to write in French but was commercially better off writing in English. [/quote]
Tut, tut, tut. This isn’t about kangaroo farming or koala shearing so you are out of your depth mate. Haven’t I corrected you about this before? Conrad never said that. Quite the reverse, he said if it weren’t for English he would’ve have bothered writing anything. Last time I provided a quote, but i’m too lazy this time round.
This is part of Conrad’s reply to someone who suggested that he had considered writing in French.
[quote]"The only thing that grieves me and makes me dance with rage is the cropping up of the legend set afloat by Hugh Clifford about my hesitation between English and French as a writing language. For it is absurd.
…And there are also other considerations: such as the sheer appeal of the language, my quickly awakened love for its prose cadences, a subtle and unforeseen accord of my emotional nature with its genius… You may take it from me that if I had not known English I wouldn’t have written a line for print, in my life."[/[/quote]
And another quote from back in 2003.
HG wrote:
[quote]Almas.
Very nice.
Now I’ve got twenty year old egg on my face. I’ve peddled my mistaken belief of Conrad’s preference for French over English for quite some time. [/quote]
But I think that is true of any translation. Does that mean we disregard say Russian or French novels in translation? [/quote]
No, I think there’s a difference. I (as one who has admittedly attempted to learn several second languages and not yet succeeded) agree that each language has its own characteristics that make it difficult or impossible to translate perfectly, capturing all of the connotations, denotations, wordplay, double-entendres, rhythm, alliteration, etc.
But I’m asking if there’s something more than just that involved when translating English to Chinese. I’m asking if Chinese is more of a crude, basic, utilitarian language than English, so that more is lost when translating the subtleties and intricacies of English into Chinese than vice-versa. I apologize if that sounds racist or egotistical. It’s not meant that way at all. It just seems from my elementary language of Chinese (as I said, tenses seems like a good example) that Chinese is more simplistic. Dui bu dui?
Very true. But then occasionally there are translations that appear to approach “perfection”. My favorite example is something I see every day on the MRT:
拉自己一把!
Get a grip!
I can say this: Chinese is a language in which the author can express most, if not all, of the subtleties of English time relations, definiteness, grammatical number, identity of the subject, etc. if he chooses to do so. (The thing is, generally they do not choose to do so!) English grammar forces us to express all these in each sentence we write.
So in Chinese-to-English translation, it’s often unclear whether something is ongoing or completed, whether singular or plural is implied, or even who is doing the action. I sometimes have to ask the author when I translate. On the other hand, the English-to-Chinese translator has access to all this information from the English text and can word it in Chinese in the most appropriate way.
[quote=“almas john”]And another quote from back in 2003.
HG wrote:
[quote]Almas.
Very nice.
Now I’ve got twenty year old egg on my face. I’ve peddled my mistaken belief of Conrad’s preference for French over English for quite some time. [/quote]
Languages are like martial arts system, each martial arts system does some things quite well, others quite poorly. Boxing has its strong suits and its Achilles heels, the same can be said for judo or karate or whatever. In a similiar vein I would strongly suspect some languages convey some things better than others.
I am not a professional translator, but I would assume you can say anything in Chinese that you can say in english; the problem is the beauty of it. And whether it requires a long additional commentary.
That problem comes out all the time in the various Chinese-English criminal law translations I have worked on. For example right now I am working on the new official translation of Taiwan’s criminal code (with all the new amendments).
What we are finding out (I say “we” because it is a team of us working on it) is there are often not one to one word corrspondances between Chinese legal concepts and western. So we just pick the most close word and realize that a translation of the ROC Criminal Code without a commentary is basically useless.
But such is life.
Speaking of which I better stop playing around on the internet and get to work on that project among others.
For improving your spoken Chinese, I think you could do worse than to read English stuff translated into Chinese. First, they are more likely to be talking about concepts and items you might need (as opposed to deep Chinese cultural stuff, which, while useful, doesn’t come up that often for me at least), and second, even if there is some “Englishness” in the translation, it is considered grammatically correct or acceptable Chinese (we assume) because it has been published (I know, I know, but let’s just assume for the sake of argument here). I am not attempting to be able to write like a native Chinese speaker; my goal as an interpreter is to be able to express ideas in a comprehensible manner. Later, like maybe after I’m 90 or so and have a fairly good grip on the basics, I’ll go for elegance. :s
I read primarily for vocabulary and, passively, for syntax, I suppose. If I were trying to improve my Chinese for the sake of having good Chinese, I might choose different, more “authentic” reading materials. But since I’m primarily concerned with going from English into Chinese on the fly, I pick stuff that is basically that.
I’m only a beginner at Mandarin, but I get the impression English has a lot more complexities and subtleties than Chinese (look at tenses for example), so that English allows a skilled writer to express ideas more precisely, accurately and, where desired, employ more subtle secondary meanings, tones (not in the pronounciation sense), plays on words, etc., so that no matter how skilled the translator, some well-written English works simply cannot be translated into Chinese (more so than the other way around). Is that true?[/quote]
I don’t think so. Chinese is just as sophisticated as English despite the absence of external markers like tenses. A linguist friend once suggested to me that Chinese is actually more elegant in terms of design than English because it has done away with all the bristling but unnecessary syntax. I’m not sure that is true. It seems to me that Chinese languages have invested more heavily in tones than word endings, but I can attest that Chinese is capable of all kinds of nuances and perhaps even more word play goes on than in English.
I think external factors like the economics of translation, size of markets, and the former of a large, educated middle class that felt duty bound to read Tolstoy affect the quality of translations more than the inherent nature of Chinese does.
That’s what I hear too. Dragonbabe often assesses the quality of a translation before deciding which language to buy a book in, whether it’s fiction or academic (philosophy, usually).
That’s good to know. I might pick up his translation to read for fun.
Like Ironlady, I read to pick up vocab. I too am reading Harry Potter in Spanish for that reason, and might read it again in Chinese at some point as a break from my academic stuff. I’ll probably read LOTR in Spanish and/or Chinese. Sure I could read the original in English, but the goal is to practice my secondary languages. I’ll read original Spanish and Chinese works too, of course.
Oh, Shadow of the Wind by Zafón will need a genius translator IMO. Read it and you’ll see what I mean. Highly recommended, btw, Ironlady. The English translation is very good, but I’m going to have to buy a Spanish copy. I wonder if it’s going to be done in Chinese at some point.
)
