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presumenothingThis is not gonna be a super well-thought out nor structured post, but it's a post anyway because reading superborb's translation thoughts post gave me translation thoughts of my own. It catches! In a non-pandemic way.
And in the context of Chinese to English translation, said thoughts obviously circle back to 知否 aka known, unknown, further aka the Nirvana in Fire epic fix-it fic spanning a whole 100k words translated (or 44 chapters + 2 extras, all of which remain eternally shocking numbers).
(Also hence the title, because what are translators if not 卷帘人… or mainly because the song has burned this poem permanently into my brain. Literature-as-music is my favourite and possibly only kind of voluntary classical text consumption.)
Necessary caveats: (a) I primarily make translations and don't read them myself these days; (b) this pertains specifically to Chinese translation, for reasons I will probably end up elaborating on; and finally (c) while I've ostensibly framed this in context of 知否 it's only in the most general of terms (owing to me not having reread the entire translation since finishing it, among other things).
Anyway! I promised thoughts, so here they are…
Foreignisation vs localisation: decisions, decisions
I tend to hit the back button on discussions of this topic because it either ends in Discourse™️ or otherwise things I generally disagree with anyway, but I really liked the mention of balancing audience-expected levels of "keikaku means plan"-ness vs the choice of making foreign a work that was, of course, not foreign in its original iteration.
(Which I would say extends beyond words-on-the-page to whatever cultural elements come attached to it, with honorifics being the most obvious though not only example — even if the non-Chinese-speaking reader knows what jiujiu means and therefore has 0 trouble parsing it, I imagine it'd still remain one level more-foreign than seeing "uncle" in their everyday language? Though this in particular is hypothetical; I only ever 'Auntie' and 'Uncle' everyone like the city brat I am XD and also the David Bellos quote made me laugh a lot, what a mood.)
…and I haven't actually brought this back to 知否, for which I'm now realising very much in retrospect that I made varying choices along the spectrum in different aspects of the translation. Much of which was documented with surprising detail in each chapter's end notes (signpost to all the T/Ns in the fic for anyone interested in the gory nitty-gritty) but my own overall impressions below:
- Honorifics. Almost fully localised, and how; look at the length of that only-mostly-comprehensive honorifics list! Liberties were very much taken because some of these would not be correct in the strict sense. See: 朕 as "one" instead of the proper royal "we" (to disambiguate with actual plural "we"), 大人 as "Lord" despite it not being a title because I'd run out of words and didn't like using -daren, and other wholesale inventions to differentiate the levels of humility implied by 臣妾/妾身, 微臣/臣 etc. The sole exceptions were pinyin for Xiao and -gege/jiejie/xiong, which I'm pretty sure I only chose in deference to fandom convention.
- Poems and terminology. Lumped together in the "would take more words than the chapter itself to fully explain" category, and also in abundance here. My choices here hopped everywhere across the local-foreign axis, starting right from the fic title (知否 in its original poem context is more a rhetorical question than anything, but since
bro don't lie to me about the flowersdon't you know? would be weird as a title it became the extremely-literal known, unknown). Poetry occurrences within the text were dealt with a mixture of editing published translations, making my own translations, and on at least two non-plot-relevant occasions replacing it entirely with an English poem. Specific terms (which spanned everything from posthomous names to food to *shudder* political theory) were handled with pinyin in some cases where meaning wasn't immediately crucial, but mostly generously-interpreted equivalent-ish terms with copious T/N-ing. - Cadence. Now this, on the other hand, I did not annotate and therefore cannot readily recall what specific choices I made beyond "err on the side of preserving structure unless it gets really unwieldy" and "some run-on is totally fine what even is grammar". And anyway I don't think I can be a good judge of it myself, so if anyone who's read it recently enough to remember would like to
vibe checktell me how it comes off as a reader that'd be fascinating actually. (Though to get into my other two NIF fic translations for a moment, because the choices there are more apparent and pretty much deliberate; 碧鲤书 aka silk scroll, twelve inches was definitely on the foreignisation end between all the poems and the original reading like a literary piece, while 萧景琰连环懵逼记 aka the dumbfounded diaries, being at least 70% a crackfic, is as casually localised as I can imagine myself getting with a serious translation.)
All in all, when I say translating 知否 for an audience was an entire historical and cultural education over and above just reading it for myself, I am definitely like. Not kidding in the least. And also I am eternally grateful that NIF fandom, from what I know, isn't as… uh, discourse-prone as some other cdramas because I feel like some of the choices I made would have been considered #problematic and heaven forbid I ever have to pull the "Chinese speaker" card because no.
Translation as transformative work, and its impact
Twice over in the most duh sense, in that 知否 was already a transformative work in its original, and as the points above probably show I allowed myself a lot of leeway in interpreting and rendering it, in a way I definitely would not have for a translation of canon material. (Or any other translation which could be taken even somewhat as The Correct Interpretation, never mind the nonsensicality of that.)
Anyway, tautology aside, I don't have super coherent thoughts on this point except that a "good" translation – loosely defined as "communicates the original work with sufficient fidelity" – is in many ways a lot like writing fic because you always write to an audience even if you don't write for one. In the same way fic writers rely on the reader knowing what only-one-bed or that-italicised-Oh. means, the translator has to make assumptions of their audience's familiarity (or lack thereof) with the language and culture they're translating from and adjust accordingly from there, and isn't that already a transformation in itself? You can extend Death of the Author to Perish the Translator all you like, but even if you ignore the translator's intent you can't actually kill their audience because those assumptions are built as inherently into the translation as tropes to a fic.
In the case of 知否 I straight-up assumed that most people reading it would have 0 existing linguistic and cultural familiarity aside from that assumed in most NIF fics at the time, which differs again from that assumed in other-cdrama fics I've read more recently. Hence the copious note adding (so much research, guys, I've never read that much Baidu in my life) and the preference for English-like translations rather than pinyin transcriptions because if I had to pick between immediacy of meaning vs language then meaning it was. Accessibility is king…
……especially in this case when I was asking readers to plow through 100k worth of densely-packed poems, politics, and plot. Oops.
Though judging by the feedback I continue to receive on it even now, that seems to have worked! With the side benefit of (and these are my favourite) comments from readers who do know some-but-not-enough Chinese appreciating the chance to experience the fic anyway, or saying it motivated them in their own language learning. 很感动！加油 guys.
Non-conclusion: it's all relative
And finally a short note on caveat (b) above, aka why I've restricted this post to solely Chinese translation when I've also done, uh. A lot of Japanese-to-English translation, to put it mildly. But we're not talking about that today, except to use it as a handy comparison.
I will eternally stop short of calling myself a native or fluent speaker of Mandarin, because I am not, in my own view, but the fact remains that it is very much a language I've known for most of my life and colloquially use daily. So in that sense it's much closer to English in my language set, both in terms of the leeway I feel comfortable taking with it and how instinctively I understand it. (Contrast this with Japanese, where I can read most things quite readily but not as easily, and would not feel comfortable taking too much liberty in most cases. I see -daren in a fic and it's basically 大人 in my head right away, whereas -neesan remains on the page even though I also know its associations and meaning. Et cetera, brains are weird.)
Off the top of my head I know this definitely does have an impact on how I translate each language, but I couldn't tell you how, except that Chinese translation feels far more fluid while I dictionary-flip a lot more when doing Japanese, in a way not dissimilar to how one starts checking 1+1=2 on the calculator half an hour into the exam. And also that I've basically never consumed any significant amount of translated-from-Chinese text and therefore don't have a reader's opinion of it (again compared to Japanese, where I started out with English translations and thus have both opinions on what reads better to me and also awareness of the translation conventions, at least for animanga).
…and I've completely lost track of where I was going with this and it's time for work anyway, so. That's them thoughts! From my very specific viewpoint. This is why I usually keep my posts short, it's the *pinches fingers* utter incoherency of 'em.
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Date: 2022-02-08 03:14 am (UTC)I'd be really interested in if you approached Japanese translation in a different way, especially since you had read a lot more translations of it before you started!
(I'm going to link this to the NIF discord, if that's okay? I think you're not in it?)
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Date: 2022-02-08 03:35 am (UTC)I was completely out of cfandom after NIF until falling back in last year starting with MDZS, and it was a definite surprise how much context the general fic now seems to assume of the reader! Not necessarily in a negative way (though for obvious reasons I also don't have a good sense of how accurate this assumption is) but very different from what I recall of NIF fic, and seeing pinyin honorifics that weren't used then sometimes still throws me more than an English equivalent would have.
And as a reader I'm actually not into too-much-footnoting fic, heh. Though there wasn't any avoiding it given the explanations required for this fic (more respect to the readers who actually got through that because I wouldn't have).
On reflection I'm also realising that part of the difference in how I feel about doing Japanese translations is because I've mostly worked on "official" material for that, so even as a fan translation it's one step less removed than the fan-of-fan-translation(?) I was doing for NIF. But even putting aside the higher expectation of accurate-ness (however defined) that comes attached with, I'm far less likely to choose a non-literal translation compared to Chinese unless I've got a good reason for it, which is at least partly from the different levels of proficiency and free-reign-confience? Or something. Hmm.
Linking is a-ok! I was on there before (assuming you mean the Langya Hall server) but not now, yeah.
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Date: 2022-02-08 02:20 pm (UTC)That's interesting, thanks!
Yep, Langya Hall server :)
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Date: 2022-02-08 03:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-08 01:34 pm (UTC)不用急！加油～！
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Date: 2022-02-10 11:09 am (UTC)Like superborb's, this is a really fascinating and really well-written post, to which I only have random free-associations in reply...
the Nirvana in Fire epic fix-it fic spanning a whole 100k words translated (or 44 chapters + 2 extras, all of which remain eternally shocking numbers).
that is an amazing feat of translation and it’s going in my to read pile, although it would be canon-blind in my case...
Poetry occurrences within the text were dealt with a mixture of editing published translations, making my own translations, and on at least two non-plot-relevant occasions replacing it entirely with an English poem.
I can't find the exact quotation (why can't we use control-F on paper books), but Edward Seidensticker has similar things to say about the poems in the Tale of Genji!
a "good" translation – loosely defined as "communicates the original work with sufficient fidelity" – is in many ways a lot like writing fic ...the translator has to make assumptions of their audience's familiarity (or lack thereof) with the language and culture they're translating from and adjust accordingly from there, and isn't that already a transformation in itself?
This is a brilliant point! Deliberately bearing in mind the nature of the readers, including the specific context they share with the translator, in a way the original author may not consciously do.
when filtered through the lens of another language the question of what shorthand works best* becomes no longer trivial in many cases. If it was ever trivial to start with!
Another very good phrase. Especially when often there isn't an immediately available 1:1 shorthand in the target language (all those honorifics in Nirvana in Fire, something like さん、くん、ちゃん in Japanese...) and the translator has to work out an original agreement with the reader, as it were, about what it's going to be.
I earn my living translating Japanese into English, but I've almost never done anything fannish in that area (I do technical manuals, academic papers, and random commercial/industrial stuff). The closest I've come to proper literary translation for a while is the long-standing project I have of a diary and letters from the 1920s, for which I deliberately try to echo the tone of contemporaneous diaries etc. originally in English. And then I use an idiom etc. and wonder if I should check that it really was current at that period, or whether it will pass muster if it's not obviously anachronistic, or...
anyway, as you see, I don't have anything coherent to say, but I really enjoy reading your experience-based views on the topic. Maybe I will be thus inspired to come up with a translation-related post of my own if I can pull my brain together a little?
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Date: 2022-02-11 04:58 pm (UTC)I can't find the exact quotation (why can't we use control-F on paper books), but Edward Seidensticker has similar things to say about the poems in the Tale of Genji!
Indeed on the control-F to paper books, but do you remember what Seidensticker was doing with the poems in The Tale of Genji?
The closest I've come to proper literary translation for a while is the long-standing project I have of a diary and letters from the 1920s, for which I deliberately try to echo the tone of contemporaneous diaries etc. originally in English.
This is very cool!
But I would love to read your translation-related post if you come up with one; I would love to hear both about the way you do translations, as well as Japanese translations into English if you want to share thoughts on those!
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Date: 2022-02-12 01:27 pm (UTC)This post was essentially me free-associating on the topic too anyway, so XD
it’s going in my to read pile, although it would be canon-blind in my case...
Not sure how comprehensible it'd be canon-blind, but then the premise is essentially that the protag has amnesia'd all of NIF canon, which I suppose may be a point in favour haha. Do let me know what you think if you end up reading it though!
but Edward Seidensticker has similar things to say about the poems in the Tale of Genji!
Ooh. I'm admittedly uninformed about Tale of Genji (aside from, well, knowing it exists and is ancient LOL) but I'd be interested if you ever do track down this quote! Poetry is an entire field of ??? in itself, given that poems aren't even necessarily accessible to a speaker of the same language, let alone between languages.
and the translator has to work out an original agreement with the reader, as it were, about what it's going to be
Exactly! Like a (very very light application of) suspension of disbelief, but applied to language, and doubly so for cases where the source and target are not recognisably similar.
And then I use an idiom etc. and wonder if I should check that it really was current at that period, or whether it will pass muster if it's not obviously anachronistic, or...
Well, I for one definitely wouldn't notice LOL. I don't think I've ever been very concerned with factual accuracy whether in writing or translation (watch me happily convert taels into the definitely-anachronistic gram) but that's also possibly because I only do it fannishly, and also history has never been my particular thing. (Now, if I had to translate science terms, on the other hand… yeah, there'd definitely be a lot of googling involved…)
Experience-based is definitely right, my brain is void of anything theoretical when it comes to translation! So it's great fun for me too seeing everyone's thoughts from other angles, and I will be all over that post if you do write it at some point.
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Date: 2022-02-08 05:39 am (UTC)Postscript: I think one of the words I was looking for earlier (which of course only occurs to me now) is that in reference to honorifics and other specific terms, what we call "translation" is actually shorthand – more specifically "target language shorthand for the concept this represents in the source culture, or at least the reader's understanding thereof". Obviously this also describes how meaning works in general, plus word choice and nuance can already be tricky within one language to start with… but when filtered through the lens of another language the question of what shorthand works best* becomes no longer trivial in many cases. If it was ever trivial to start with!
(*again oversimplifying on multiple levels, including the assumption that the reader is sufficiently fluent in the target language for there to be a good shorthand at all, but that's a whole 'nother can of squiggly things)
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Date: 2022-02-08 09:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-08 02:32 pm (UTC)When I started learning Japanese, I was really excited about the times when I'd be able to share my knowledge with other fans
Ah, that's definitely familiar! Translation discourse is definitely Big Yikes and most of the time I'm only even seeing it secondhand – I'm glad that I got started translating before it really cropped up (at least on my dash), and probably helped that most of it was off Tumblr anyway.
For me I think translating stuff hits a couple of the same buttons I also like about writing (something about the twist-words-into-pretzels aspect probably) so I do really enjoy it when I've got the mental resources to spare. Which is admittedly not so much, these days XD definitely couldn't manage another monster sized translation like this one.
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Date: 2022-02-09 12:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-12 11:12 am (UTC)Not to be all Ugh Fandom These Days but yeah, entitlement towards translation (and therefore taking their availability for granted with a side of free-for-all criticism from any bystander) definitely is an offputting phenomenon especially in recent years, hoo boy. Maybe we all need an excursion back to the badly-scanned-manga-typeset-in-Comic-Sans days just as a reminder of how things used to be 😂
I still have a bunch of translation theory/practice books on my shelves I mean to return to at some point, though
…just realised I have absolutely no idea what would go in such books, would love to hear your thoughts if/when you get around to them! I think the most I've read on translation are probably like, manga scanlation style guides XD everything else is slapdash gained from the rolling tumbleweed of trial-and-error.
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Date: 2022-02-12 12:44 pm (UTC)This could be fun XD I think the entitlement is a consequence of the lack of familiarity with what the gift economy is or even means... It really sucks.
…just realised I have absolutely no idea what would go in such books, would love to hear your thoughts if/when you get around to them!
If I'm still on Dreamwidth when I do that, I'll definitely talk about it :D I find that stuff super fun to learn and think about! In addition to fandom sucking the fun parts out of translating, I also killed the rest of my interest in it with the pressure to "monetise" or "use it in my career" like a fool. Lesson learnt. I'm waiting until all the unpleasant feelings die off so I can make it fun again. Maybe a couple more years :D
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Date: 2022-02-08 10:15 am (UTC)Which I would say extends beyond words-on-the-page to whatever cultural elements come attached to it, with honorifics being the most obvious though not only example — even if the non-Chinese-speaking reader knows what jiujiu means and therefore has 0 trouble parsing it, I imagine it'd still remain one level more-foreign than seeing "uncle" in their everyday language?
On the one hand, yes for the (lack of) cultural context, but on the other, there's an added level when it's fic for a show or film you watched in the original, with subtitles. Or at least for me - in some ways jiujiu etc. manages to be more immediate than "uncle" because it directly evokes the characters' voices: I can hear the character say it in my head, and a translated term, no matter how spot on, can't do that. (That's why I personally like it when forms of address especially are not translated in the text - though I definitely appreciate everyone who adds footnotes/endnotes!)
(Also, come to think of it, I grew up with English books translated into German that always used some English terms, especially forms of address - from very easily-translated ones (Mr, Mrs) to ones that don't have a direct German equivalent (sir) - so that sort of thing feels normal to me, I guess!)
except that Chinese translation feels far more fluid while I dictionary-flip a lot more when doing Japanese in a way not dissimilar to how one starts checking 1+1=2 on the calculator half an hour into the exam
Haha, I arrive at that point in every language eventually.
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Date: 2022-02-12 08:37 am (UTC)in some ways jiujiu etc. manages to be more immediate than "uncle" because it directly evokes the characters' voices:
Ah, that's an interesting point, I hadn't considered the association with hearing it spoken in-show! (Probably also because I'm not a very audio-oriented person in general, haha.)
I think the only cases of "forms of address in different language from rest of text" I read growing up (which was before I got into animanga fandom) was like… the occasional French in Hercule Poirot novels? XD But colloquially IRL I've always used an all-over-the-place word salad of languages on the daily so I think I'm much more used to having that in spoken mediums than written.
Haha, I arrive at that point in every language eventually.
*shakes fist at the unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence pipeline* Why!!
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Date: 2022-02-12 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-08 02:32 pm (UTC)a "good" translation – loosely defined as "communicates the original work with sufficient fidelity" – is in many ways a lot like writing fic because you always write to an audience even if you don't write for one
I can only speak from very minimal and amateur experience on this topic, but this all makes a lot of sense to me. There are so many choices you have to make about how to interpret the original before you can try to convey the "same" meaning (and feeling!) faithfully in another language, and yeah, a lot of that will rely on assumptions you have to make about the target audience of the translation itself, and what level/kind of fidelity to the original they want or are expecting. I've never thought about that being like fanfic before, but it really kind of is. And fanfic as a whole phenomenon certainly highlights how wide a range of readings/interpretations there can be for the same source material...
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Date: 2022-02-12 10:38 am (UTC)I think living in a very-language-mashup context where I automatically pull up different levels of English/Chinese/other mix depending on who I'm speaking to has given a kind of… inescapable audience awareness?… that carries over to the way I perceive translation
when I actually decide to, y'know, perceive it. Codeswitching 2.0 in written form and all that. And of course my main contribution in fandom has always been via writing fic, so it's a comparison that immediately pops up to me – especially since I do enjoy doing constrained writing (drabbles, 3 sentence fics…) which has a similar element of "rearrange this sentence in your head until it makes sense without doubling the length" kind of puzzle-solving that's often also needed for translation.Though actually the question of whether you can have a context-neutral translation (and if not, how close can you get to one) could probably be an interesting topic in itself! For people more inclined to Deep Thoughts about this than I am, at least…
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Date: 2022-02-16 10:25 pm (UTC)With that out of the way, this was a hugely interesting post. I'm taking a translation theory course at the moment that talks A Lot about these sorts of things, but it lacks the immediate 'ah yes I know the context' feeling as discussions that involve fandom translations, so I appreciated that as a break from things (also the philosophy, go away with all your Foucaults and Kants ugh).
I don't think I've yet formed that many opinions myself, beyond the very duh idea of 'every project is different, generalisations come to translation to die' and the equally duh 'the extreme ends of any localisation/foreignisation choice are always going to be more controversial and experimental'.
Anyway, I'm glad to have read some of your thoughts on the matter.
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Date: 2022-02-17 02:58 pm (UTC)generalisations come to translation to die
XD pretty metal motto right there.
To be fair, not many people (other than ones I complained to in the process) realise I was the one who translated it! It's very different from my own fics, down to the ridiculous length and like. Proper chapter notes. Gasp.
(Also, Kant, ugh. Another one for the naughty box! Think about what you've done!)
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Date: 2022-02-17 03:35 pm (UTC)I was feeling inspired by frustration XD
To be fair, not many people (other than ones I complained to in the process) realise I was the one who translated it! It's very different from my own fics, down to the ridiculous length and like. Proper chapter notes. Gasp.
I LOVED the chapter notes, they were so neat. I'm very into reading fic and accidentally learning things while I do.