试问卷帘人

[presumenothing]

This 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 flowers don'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 check tell 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.

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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.

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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.

Comments

[grayswandir]

I found this whole post really interesting, but especially the part about translations as transformative works, and how audience affects translation choices --

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...

[presumenothing]

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…