|
As we'll all agree, there's no such thing as a word-for-word or sense-for-sense translation. Contexts vary across cultures. Biases come into play due to lived versus understood experiences. And even a functionalist approach, where we put the requirements of the designated reader before our desire to be faithful to the original, requires a strong understanding of both source and target cultures.
When I was translating my first story collection by the Gujarati short story pioneer, Dhumketu, I had to research many of the places, processes, participants (human and nonhuman) within the worlds he had created. He wrote during an earlier era with a very different sensibility. Immersing myself in the early-twentieth century history, culture, and politics of his places and people helped me ensure that my own contemporary biases and prejudices against them didn't manifest on the page (to the extent that I was self-aware enough to spot them myself.)
Even when we're translating contemporary works, we're going to run into challenges where we're unsure of the original writer's meaning. Unlike readers who can skip over sentences they don't quite get, translators cannot. We have to make informed guesses. Those guesses can only be good enough if we've cultivated a certain "archive and ecology of the mind" (a phrase I'm borrowing from the scholar and translator, Rita Kothari) where all of these disciplines are interwoven.
For me, this cross-disciplinary approach is a large part of the fun and satisfaction of being a translator. It's not enough to be bilingual/multilingual because, to state the obvious for some of you, translation isn't just transposing text from language A to language B. (OK, strictly speaking, ethnography is a branch of anthropology but it's important enough that it needs to be called out specifically.)
Of course, if we're doing all of this diligently, we run up against another hurdle. Given what we learn through all our reading "around" the text we're translating, where do we draw the boundaries or find that balance between freedom and constraint? Where we're somewhere between the two polarized positions of ‘translator as slave to the original’ and ‘translator as creator of a new original’ (see Susan Bassnett's book, Translation)? A topic to dive into with another newsletter.
In the meantime, feel free to hit reply to let me know your thoughts to all or any of the above. Or you can share on social media and tag me (links below.) I check in once a day there and will be happy to respond.
Best,
|
