Annals of bad literary translation

I’m excited to have another amazing story to add to Life in Translation’s collection of bad literary translations.  At the same time, though, it’s disappointing to see that French readers who thought they were reading classic 1950’s hardboiled detective and noire novels were actually reading distorted and condensed versions of them.

Here is the L’Expresse article: Polars américains: la traduction était trop courte.  [American detective novels: The translation was too short.]

Too short—the article relates how entire paragraphs and even chapters were cut out for the translated versions (sound familiar? but the result will have been even worse in mystery novels, where it may result in clues being lost). In some cases, where the amputations (as the article calls them) left the story incomprehensible, bridging text was invented out of whole cloth. The L’Expresse article includes shocking photos of the vandalized text that the translators were supposed to work from.

Moreover, the translators apparently simply didn’t understand English well enough to produce accurate translations. One example: in a scene in James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss, the detective goes to a topless bar. In French, the bar is topless too, but “without a roof”; i.e., homeless.

First ever direct English translation of Stanisław Lem's “Solaris”

What is it with classic novels and bad translations? (See past posts on bad or faulty translations of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, The Second Sex reloaded, Levi’s The Periodic Table, and Verne’s Off On a Comet (Hector Servadac).)

Now it turns out that the only available English version of Stanisław Lem’s 1961 Polish science fiction novel Solaris had been relay translated from a poor French version. The Guardian reports that a new direct translation by Bill Johnston has just been published which “remov[es] a raft of unnecessary changes and restor[es] the text much closer to its original state.”

“There are also moments where the meaning has simply become distorted or even inverted,” said Johnston.

When have we seen this before? Every time! The Guardian article also describes some of the reversions to the novel’s original names that will make the effect on the English language reader closer to that of the original on the Polish language reader. As also seen in other accounts of poorly translated classics, the previous translators did not hesitate to cut corners; for instance summarizing dialogue into narrative. The article doesn’t say whether these faults were due to the intermediary French version, or whether they were made in the previous English version.

“All in all, the [original] translation, though it tells the story of Solaris, frequently fails to convey Lem’s style, his humour, his attention to detail. Above all, it is not a careful and accurate translation of the text that he wrote,” said [Johnston]. “The new translation will finally allow English-language readers to experience Lem's extraordinary, prescient, ever-relevant novel in all its fullness.”

The article reports that the novel is first coming out in audio version, and later e-book. If some legal issues can be resolved, the publisher hopes to bring out a print version.

Strike Two for “The Second Sex”

The story about the new translation into English of Simone Beauvoir’s Le deuxieme sexe (The Second Sex) turns out to have a shocking and disappointing sequel.

To recap, the original 1953 translation was full of inaccuracies ranging from distortions to errors that reversed the meaning of Beauvoir’s words, as well as sizeable omissions.

A new translation was finally commissioned in 2006 by the holder of the British rights (see article). But now that it has been published it has come in for heavy criticism, too. This article by Toril Moi in the London Review of Books describes how the translators seem to have been inadequate to the task.

The translators stated that their aim, besides restoring the cut material and correcting mistranslations, was to restore Simone Beauvoir’s voice to the text. Professor Moi believes that they failed. The examples she cites show that they adhered much too closely to French sentence structure and vocabulary, apparently in a mistaken belief that this rendered the translation more faithful. Instead, it resulted in a text replete with false friends at the level of vocabulary, syntax, and style.

Followup to elements: Anecdote found

A year ago, I wrote:

I remember reading an anecdote about a translation of a major literary work in which the translator wasn't familiar with chemistry, didn’t know the names of the elements in the target language, didn't bother to look them up, and got many of them wrong. I’d like to be more specific, but unfortunately I didn’t save the article and could never find it again in spite of much searching. Does anyone remember the specifics? That translator would surely have enriched his translation, as well as gotten it right if he'd had a resource like “Elementymology” to consult.

I have found the particulars of this case in an article by David Mendel, called “Primo Levi and Translation.” Here are the missing details I couldn’t remember:

David Jones, like Levi, both chemist and writer, reviewing Raymond Rosenthal's translation of L'altrui mestiere (Other People's Trades) in the Times listed a number of words in Levi's works, which had been wrongly translated. In The Periodic Table the translator made up English names for the rare elements. As the authentic English names could be found in any dictionary, to invent them is unforgivable. These elements were, understandably, unfamiliar to the translator, but he did not look them up. Perhaps he was translating against the clock; it is a badly paid job.

The article is well worth reading on many counts. It discusses Primo Levi both as translated writer and as translator himself.

Geography lesson needed?

*jaw drops, hits floor*

Elements and Spices

Thanks to Michael of Translate This, here is a pointer to Elementymology & Elements Multidict by Peter van der Krogt, a site which gives the entymology of the elements and their names in 72 languages.

I remember reading an anecdote about a translation of a major literary work in which the translator wasn't familiar with chemistry, didn't know the names of the elements in the target language, didn't bother to look them up, and got many of them wrong. I'd like to be more specific, but unfortunately I didn't save the article and could never find it again in spite of much searching. Does anyone remember the specifics? That translator would surely have enriched his translation, as well as gotten it right if he'd had a resource like "Elementymology" to consult.

Diverting from the initial subject in another direction, Gernot Kater's Spice Pages does basically the same thing as Elementymology but for spices and herbs; history, chemical constituents, etymology, photographs, and names in 72 languages.

Jules Verne needs better English translations

Just because a body of work is a venerated classic doesn't mean the translations we have are necessarily good. From an article by Adam Roberts in the Guardian:

I'd always liked reading Jules Verne and I've read most of his novels; but it wasn't until recently that I really understood I hadn't been reading Jules Verne at all.

I'll explain what I mean. Verne has been globally popular since the 19th century, and all his titles have been translated into English, most of them soon after their initial publication. But almost all of them were translated so badly, so mutilated that "translation" is something of a misnomer.

Some of this I knew already. I'd heard that the original translators into English felt at liberty to cut out portions of Verne's original text, particularly where they felt he was getting too "technical" or "scientific"; and I'd heard that one of those early translators - the Reverend Lewis Page Mercier - had bowdlerised any sentiments hostile towards or injurious to the dignity of Great Britain [...] I knew too that the original English translators tended to mangle the metric system measurements of Verne's careful measurements and descriptions, either simply cutting the figures out, or changing the unit from metric to imperial but, oddly, keeping the numbers the same.

But I didn't understand just how severe the issue was until I set about preparing an English edition of a Verne title myself.

His publishers decided to put out one of Verne's lesser-known titles, Off On a Comet (Hector Servadac), in conjunction with Mr. Roberts's new book. He describes what happened next.

I thought it would be a simple matter of reprinting the original, usefully out-of-copyright 1877 English translation, and blithely said yes.

But when I checked the 1877 translation against the original my heart sank. It was garbage. On almost every page the English translator, whoever he, or she, was (their name is not recorded), collapsed Verne's actual dialogue into a condensed summary, missed out sentences or whole paragraphs. She or he messed up the technical aspects of the book. She or he was evidently much more anti-Semitic than Verne, and tended to translate what were in the original fairly neutral phrases such as "...said Isaac Hakkabut" with idioms such as "...said the repulsive old Jew." And at one point in the novel she or he simply omitted an entire chapter (number 30) - quite a long one, too - presumably because she or he wasn't interested in, or couldn't be bothered to, turn it into English.

Hector Servadac is by no means an unusual case. Whilst a few of Verne's most famous titles have been retranslated by proper scholars (for instance, William Butcher's recent Oxford University Press translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea is very good), in most cases the only editions we have of these works are the hacked-about, disfigured, and in some places rewritten versions originally published in the 19th century.

It's a bizarre situation for a world-famous writer to be in. Indeed, I can't think of a major writer who has been so poorly served by translation.

Mr. Roberts proposes a mass effort to retranslate Verne's work properly.

This would be the way to address the common misconceptions about Verne's writings that so infuriate Verne specialists - that he is nothing better than a jumped-up author of two-dimensional juveniles; that he can't do character; that his stories are ineptly handled or clumsily put together. None of these things is true; but until we have a full range of properly translated titles these, and like accusations, are going to continue to dog his reputation. We need more and better translations of Verne.

A Site for Movie Translation Mistakes

A bilingual movie-watcher can often recognize dubbing mistakes through knowledge of the original version. We find these errors horridly fascinating. "Navaja en el ojo" at "Switch off and Let's Go" points us to a collection of movie dubbing goofs. (As she points out, most, but not all of them are translation mistakes.)

A sample mistake: In an episode of "Babylon 5," there was a reference to the epidemic called "El Auxilio" ("The Help"), namely AIDS.

Submissions are invited. At the site, it says

Parece mentira, pero aun teniendo en cuenta que en el proceso de doblaje intervienen como mínimo un traductor, un adaptador de texto y el propio actor de doblaje, a veces ...se cuelan gazapos. De momento la lista que hemos elaborado es muy breve, pero esperamos que crezca con tu ayuda.

It's hard to believe, but even though the dubbing process involves at least a translator, an adaptor and the dubbing actor, sometimes... there are goofs. Our list is still short, but with your help, we hope it can grow.

New Translation of "The Second Sex"

Remember last year three years ago* when the story went around about how bad the 1953 English translation, The Second Sex, of Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe was?

To summarize, the translation is said to be full of hundreds of major and minor errors, some of which do not merely miss or distort the meaning, but make the text state the opposite of the original. The original translator was a retired professor of zoology selected because the American publisher judged the book by its the title and thought it was a sex manual. The translator had no specialized knowledge of philosophy and knew French only from his student days. In addition, at the publisher's request, hefty chunks of the book were cut in the translated edition.

Even when the story about the bad translation made the rounds, inspired by the 50th anniversary of the publication, the publisher refused to authorize a new edition.

But now it turns out that a new translation was commissioned by the British rights holder in early 2006, and is about half finished! This article by Sarah Glazer in Bookforum tells how translators Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier got to translate Le Deuxième Sexe into English anew. Both are Paris-based Americans who have taught English at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques for many years.

Apparently Beauvoir scholars have expressed concerns that non-philosophers were selected to carry out the translation. However, Glazer writes:

Both women expressed surprise at the concerns about their lack of philosophical background and assistance. They said they are consulting with philosophers, including Margaret A. Simons, author of a groundbreaking article pointing out Parshley's [the original translator's] errors. They've sought out a biologist to critique the chapter on the biology of sex, a friend with analytic training to go over the psychoanalysis chapter, and a medievalist to decipher the Old French quotations. They've commissioned translations by specialists of the extensive poetry citations from Paul Claudel, André Breton, and Michel Leiris. The job is so overwhelming, they said, that they've asked for grant money to fund additional assistance.

Further, they will restore the material cut from the first translation, and are considering the original in their choice of language:

To retain the formality of Beauvoir's voice, who used vous with Sartre and other intimates throughout her life, they reversed their original decision to introduce contractions. To give it a period flavor, they are steering away from words that came into common usage after 1949. That's the basis for their decision to avoid the word gender, which today is more commonly used in the places Beauvoir uses sex.

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*sign of advancing age

A different reason to choose human translation

Last December, Blogherald, a blogger's blog, installed a plugin to translate their content to eight languages, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Today, they announced that they've decided to remove it... because of technical problems. They're exploring human translation as an alternative.

It's interesting that technical—not quality—criteria motivated the change. It's not that they're unaware of the quality of machine translation, for they note:

At any rate, most foreign language speakers observe machine translated articles as crude and barely readable as genuine translation anyway. They are too literal, and devoid of usable context.

Nevertheless, if machine translation in its current state does have any use, it's precisely this; to give readers of a different language a general idea of what an article says. But with their pilot project in human translation to Japanese, they've invited their Japanese readers to share the Blogherald experience, not just to peer in at the windows.

Would you trust a barefoot shoemaker?

This discussion at ProZ is about how to regard an agency whose own website isn't, shall we say, a good advertisement for their own language services. It's not hard to find examples. As Dave Barry would say, "I am not making this up."

One agency is a little shaky in punctuation, prepositions and tenses:

Why we are the best?

In XXXX, we specialized in the following languages:
[It may not be clear from this isolated sentence, but the context shows that this was meant to express, "At XXXX, we specialize in the following languages:"]

Another agency has basically correct, though workmanlike English, but an unfortunately chosen preposition leaps out at the reader:

We will pay special attention on the following:

A third agency has correct, fairly native-sounding English throughout their website, except for the first paragraph on the introduction page. Ouch!

Established in 19--, XXX Traductores in time becomes one of the largest full service translation companies in the Americas; in 19--, it establishes in [city in USA], XXX Translation Center, today xxx.com.

This agency's blurb is a lovely example of "third language" or "translationese." It's correct, or almost correct English, but the manner of expression, the sentence structure, vocabulary choice, and even the overall decision of what to say to the reader are entirely Spanish:

What identifies this corporation is its seriousness and professionalism, as well as its complete confidentiality, personalized treatment and the excellent service that we offer, which have allowed us to achieve an outstanding performance.

For the fulfillment of our main objective, which consists of providing a quality and specialized service, the translators, interpreters and the staff that collaborate with this corporation is integrated by highly qualified professionals, mainly experts certified by the Superior Court of Justice and acknowledged by different Embassies both in [our country] and abroad.

But this one wins my "Barefoot Shoemaker" prize:

The background of our Company starts in the year 19--, as XXX. This company turns into YYY a couple of years alter and finally in 19--, it consolidated into the Company we are today: ZZZ, which Board of Directors is chaired by Lic. ABC.

Some of the attributes that make us different are: excellent quality in translation and interpretation, selection of the ideal interpreters for each topic, equipment in perfect operating conditions, trained and responsible technical personnel, excellent customer service, timeliness in delivering our services and we are willing and able to make your event a success regardless of its magnitude or where it is held in the world.

Our history includes, amongst a large number of clients, internationally renown universities such as: [list of "renown" universities], and also world renown international companies and organizations such as: [list of "renown" companies and organizations] amongst other.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating

Some days I feel curmudgeonly. And here's why.

How does a client know if a translator is good? Experience, education, qualifications... If you want to hire a translator, should you require that he or she has a degree in translation, a degree in the subject matter, sufficient experience...?

Here's a query about how to translate: "Do not make change for a customer outside of their order."

A difficult sentence? Tricky? Requires specialized technical subject matter knowledge?

Two translators with university degrees in translation thought it meant "Do not make any change that the customer has not ordered," while another translator, with over 20 years experience, thought it meant "Do not make changes to the customer's order." And yes, all of them purport to translate professionally from English.

So if you were going to hire a translator, would you judge them by their qualifications and experience, or by their product? Why are translators so resistant to doing tests? On various translator forums where translators voice their opinions, I read that tests are useless; tests only take advantage of translators and yield no benefit; that a potential client can better judge the translator's competence from their qualifications, education and experience.

On the contrary, I see evidence time and again that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, not in the recipe.