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A few links to stuff online that I’ve been meaning to write about . . .
The Monumenta Nipponica Style Sheet
A complete PDF is available on the web. At my company we have our own style sheet (a senpai gave a presentation on it at the IJET conference held last year in Kobe), and I spend time looking at other examples of such things when I can. The disaster that is my desk sports plenty of book-length guides: Chicago, the Associated Press, the Economist, the New York Times. Most of our own work is done according to Chicago rules, with extra guidelines we’ve come up with to handle Japanese text and other things not covered in that book. (SWET’s Japan Style Sheet is another good one to have on hand for those issues.)
World literature: Found in translation
This article from the Christian Science Monitor notes that less than 3% of all books published in English are translations from other tongues, and talks about groups that have sprung up to raise that percentage. Given the massive amounts of English publications coming out each year I’m not sure this ratio is out of line with what’s “proper,” but as a translator I can’t complain about folks making efforts to increase the size of my industry. So more power to them. I’ve done some work for the Japanese Literature Publishing and Promotion Center, which is taking money from the government and putting it toward just this kind of activity. In November 2006 Kodansha announced a new grant program that gives up to $10,000 to a foreign publisher willing to take on the translation and publication of a work from the company’s list. Not nearly enough to pay the full cost of translating, editing, and printing a book, but it does take a chunk out of those costs.
Found in translation: a life’s passion
This is an interview with Tran Thien Dao, a French-to-Vietnamese (and vice versa) translator. Interesting read, but he says some eyebrow-raising things about the transparent role of the translator:
I’ve always believed translators are like monkeys. When an author raises his or her hand, the monkey must mirror the action, also raising its hand. Translators must interpret the exact meaning of what the author wrote and respect the author’s literary style. If a translator makes a boring work interesting in his or her translation, then he or she has betrayed the author. If the author writes incoherently, the translator must stay true to the text. One must keep in mind that you should never translate a piece word by word, or you’ll lose the writing’s context. . . .
Another thing people need to know is that translation is not a creative process. If a translator uses his or her imagination, it is a mistake.
I’m the first to admit to having monkeylike qualities, oop oop, but nine times out of ten the above approach will create a stupid translation. It seems sensible to say “you mustn’t add or subtract information in the process of a faithful translation,” but there are problems here. First, Words aren’t the same as information. Japanese readers, for instance, bring contextual understanding to the table when they approach a Japanese text, and something like 田園調布から川崎へ引っ越さざるを得なかった means more to them than simply “I had to move from Den’en Chofu to Kawasaki.” A faithful translation should be able to get all that extra info across: I was living in the ritzy Den’en Chofu district, but I had to move to a more run-down area in Kawasaki. Second, what Tran Thien Dao has to say might hold more water when it comes to literature, but in commercial translation we’re always removing things (too many words for the printed page!) and making boring texts more exciting (thanks, this will work much better in our marketing packet!) and so on.
『匂いをかがれるかぐや姫』を読んで
Last but not least, here’s a piece (in Japanese) on what was probably the easiest translation project ever to make it into book form. Step one: choose some beloved Japanese folktales. Step two: run them through a computer translation package into English and back again into Japanese. Step three: um, you’re done. Clean up the copy a bit and print! Fun examples from the book in that article include this parsing error:
- Original: 「がんばってくるんだぞ」
- J to E: “It was wrapped hard”
- E to J: 「それは一生懸命包装」
and this refreshingly direct approach to individual kanji meanings:
- Original: 仏様
- J to E: France state
- E to J: フランス状態
Good times. It’s something to consider next time I’m working on a project. Or rather, “That considering the following time which I have tackled project is something.”
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