This course offers you basic but valuable techniques used by a good translator in the translation between English and Chinese. We’ll discuss what is translation, what is good translation, and learn about how to produce good translations. All the examples used in this course are taken from the course instructor's own translations of various genres and topics of writing. These examples are elaborated on to show you how to understand the idea, style and tone of the writer, the historical and cultural context of the writing, as well as the explicit and implied meanings of words, the grammatical structures of sentences, and the logic of sentences and paragraphs in order to achieve faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance in the translation. After completing this course, you will know what makes a qualified professional translator and acquire the abilities and skills that such a translator needs
What Is Good Translation
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En provenance du cours de Nanjing University
Translation in Practice
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À partir de la leçon
A Brief Introduction to Translation
This module discusses why translation matters, what is translation, and what is good translation. It also gives an overview of the content of the entire course.
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Yuan YaoAssociate Professor
The topic of this lesson is what is good translation.
Before we answer this question,
let's read together a translation.
This is the original sentence in English.
Millie hunts close, quarters well,
points beautifully, is staunch to wing and shot,
and retrieves with verve.
You need to know,
you may have guessed, Millie is dog.
Now, let's read the Chinese translation.
[FOREIGN].
Whoa, Millie must be a genius.
She can divide the game into four equal parts and she can shoot.
Perhaps she's not a dog,
but a huntsman in disguise.
This translation is very suspicious.
When we read the source language,
we see that the translator did not understand a few key words.
Quarter can mean to divide into four equal parts.
It can also mean to range over an area in every direction.
The second meaning is appropriate in this context,
especially when considering a fact that Millie is a dog.
Point does not mean to tell or give direction,
but to hold her head towards the game.
Shot is a mass noun,
which means tiny lead pellets used in a single charge or cartridge in a shotgun.
All these words are related to hunting.
In the lesson, about why we translate,
we mentioned that translation communicates the thought, perspectives,
experiences, feelings expressed in language A to readers of language B.
A translation cannot be
good if it does not communicate the meaning of the source language.
This translation does not communicate the meaning of the source language.
Good translation requires more than conveying the meaning of the source language.
Here's another translation of the sentence about Millie.
[FOREIGN].
Does the translation convey the meaning in a source language?
I should say so.
Is it good translation?
No. I don't think so.
It reads boring and dull.
If this translation is bad because the language it uses is bad,
then is the translation good if the language is fluent, expressive, and beautiful?
Let's take a look at this.
[FOREIGN]
This Chinese sentence is a very vivid description of a hunting scene.
A clever, quick, loyal and proud dog magically kills a bird.
However, when we look at the English sentence,
we find it doesn't mention at all how the dog gets
the bird that is about to fly away when her owner shoots at it.
This translation is not really translation, it is rewriting.
What we looked at just now are two extremes of translation.
They bring us to the discussion of or debate on what is
good translation that has been going on ever since human beings began to translate.
During the three kingdoms period,
a Chinese translator named [FOREIGN]
translated more than 20 Buddhist sutras.
He believed that a translation should [FOREIGN].
In other words, he emphasized the communication of
meaning instead of the fluency of language.
[FOREIGN], a well-known Buddhist in a Tang Dynasty,
pointed out that good translation [FOREIGN].
He was saying that the translation should be
faithful to the original text and be easy to understand.
In other words, both the conveyance of the meaning
and the fluency of the language are important.
The relationship between faithfulness and expressiveness has been
a central issue in the discussion of the criteria of good translation.
[FOREIGN], a modern Chinese writer and translator,
said that in translation,
he would [FOREIGN],
giving high priority to the readability of the translation.
Responding to [FOREIGN] words,
[FOREIGN], another modern Chinese writer and translator,
said [FOREIGN],
which aroused a heated debate in a Chinese literary circle at that time.
[FOREIGN] and [FOREIGN] and [FOREIGN]
all indicate the difficult situation translations are often in.
It will be great if the translation can be truthful and expressive,
but in reality, it's very difficult to be both.
When we do translations,
we may not consciously think about making a choice between the two.
But when we are in difficulty or dilemma,
we realize that we have to make a choice.
Are we going to be faithful to the original text or to the reader?
Are we going to create a beautiful but unfaithful translation?
Or are we going to create a faithful but not beautiful translation?
If we want our translation to be exactly the same as the original text,
we may cause barriers in understanding to the readers.
If we want the readers to enjoy reading,
we may take the risk of misrepresenting the original text.
As the Canadian writer, Anne Michaels,
says in Fugitive Pieces,
you choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to
live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning,
the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude.
In translation studies and practice in contemporary times,
some new ideas have been presented.
[FOREIGN], a writer
and translator from Taiwan, says [FOREIGN].
It would be perfect if we could have it both ways,
but in practice, when should we make compromises and to what extent.
[FOREIGN], who translated many well-known French writers' works,
says [FOREIGN].
The question is how do we express the spirit of the original work?
Maybe the answer is what [FOREIGN] has said.
It depends on each individual translator on his or her flexibility,
which means that translator's subjectivity plays an important role in translation.
How do we understand the translator's subjectivity?
The Czech scholar, Jiri Levy,
says translation is a decision making process.
If the translator makes the decision,
then he or she can be freed from the difficult situation of being
caught between being faithful and expressive between the original work and the readers.
However, we have to realize that while it's
true that translator's decisions are affected by his or her knowledge,
experience, values, even characters,
they're also affected by the time,
the society, the culture the translator is in as well.
How subjective is a translator's subjectivity is an issue to be discussed.
In translation practice, translators encounter all kinds of complicated issues.
To a certain extent,
the understanding of what is translation and what is good
translation serves as a compass that tells us which direction to go.
But how do we get there?
We need the help of translation techniques,
which will be discussed in the following lessons.
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