Home
Webmail
Sakura
Flickr
About meTranslation books reviewed
This post to the NBR Japan forum reviews three Japanese-language books on the art and business of translation. Looks like I might have to head down to the bookstore on the first floor and take a look at one or more of them.
The books are:
- Torikai Kumiko, Rekishi o kaeta goyaku (Mistranslations that changed history), Shincho Bunko, Shincho-sha, April 1998 [Amazon.co.jp]
- Iwanami Shoten Editorial Department, ed., Honyakuka no shigoto (The work of translators), Iwanami Shinsho, December 2006 [Amazon.co.jp]
- Murakami Haruki and Shibata Motoyuki, Honyaku yawa (Evening tales of translation), Bunshun Shinsho, Bungei Shunju, October 2000 [Amazon.co.jp]
This last work was reviewed by Kevin Kirton in the Spring 2001 JAT Bulletin. (Bulletins are available online if you’re a JAT member.) He writes:
One of the translation issues that this book illustrates very clearly is that if you intend to translate anything, you have to be prepared to make yourself completely vulnerable: vulnerable in the sense that there is no perfect translation, only good translations and bad translations—or, more precisely, subjectively better or subjectively worse translations. You will always be open to criticism that you have not captured the original completely, that the nuance of your translation is off target, that this sentence is weak, that this word is wrong. How many native Japanese-writing translators would feel more competent than Murakami and Shibata to translate Raymond Carver? [Short stories by Carver and Paul Aster are presented in this book alongside their translations by the two Japanese.] Even still, comparing their translations side by side with the original, you will come across sections where it is clearly possible to see that one translation is somehow better than the other. Murakami and Shibata note numerous examples of this while discussing their parallel translations. So, whether you decide to view this aspect of translation as a challenge, or as a reason to take comfort in imperfection, the message is the same: prepare to make yourself as vulnerable to criticism as Murakami and Shibata have so graciously offered to be in this book.
It is a good idea for translators to open themselves up to criticism. The problem is that this criticism can be hard to come by at times. If you’re a freelancer sending off your jobs via email, they often seem to disappear into the black hole of the Internet. Sure, some money lands in your bank account on the fifteenth of the next month, but there isn’t any feedback to speak of for a lot of work. Finding clients who have an active interest in making you a better translator by keeping that communication flowing, or working in-house to get that built-in feedback every day, are two ways to gain the criticism that improves your work. (The other way is to get published and go read comments on the Amazon.com page, I suppose. Most of them will be on the writing as writing and not as a translation, though.)
(Via the Japan-US Discussion Forum.)
-
Flickr photos
www.flickr.com 
More of Durf's photos
Comments are closed for this entry.