Translators - the unsung heroes and heroines (and sometimes villains)

There have been a lot of times this year when the subject of translation has come up in discussion, and which translation is "best" for certain books.

The talents of a really skilled translator often go unnoticed, but a poor translation can ruin a great book.

I remember discussing with @Busifer the different theories and principles of translation, and how to deal with foreign elements of culture: does the translator add contextual explanation, change it into the nearest 'domestic' equivalent (such as turning a troika into a hansom cab and a serf into a servant), or simply trust the reader to either have some background knowledge or be willing to look up the unfamiliar. Which approach one prefers is a matter of personal taste, but it is good to know in advance whether you are getting the right style of translation for you.

And then of course, there are the translators who take it upon themselves to rewrite and "improve upon" the original, to edit out "difficult" passages, or simply get things wrong. It is good to have a warning against them!

So I wanted to start a thread for recording the style, skill and failings of translators I come across, so that I know who to look out for in the future.

Please everyone - if you read anything in translation, please add your impressions to the list.

I have read two books of short stories by Tolstoy this year, with different translators. Both were of short fables of peasant life, with religious themes.

Where Love Is, There Is God Also - translator Nathan Haskell Dole

He seemed to be most interested in the exotic "Russian-ness" of the story. He kept a lot of Russian words, such as starets with footnotes to explain their meaning.

Normally, this is the approach that I prefer, but - perhaps because he was writing in 1887, for an audience that knew far less about Russia, here it seemed overdone.

Tolstoy's themes are about essential human values, this read more as "look how different Russians are".

What Men Live By and Other Tales - translators Louise Shanks Maude and Aylmer Maude

Louise and Aylmer Maude were a couple who lived in Russia (Louise was born there) and were personal friends of the author, and shared many of his religious beliefs, including providing practical assistance to the Doukhobors. So they were certainly well-placed to understand both Russian culture in general and the author's intent in particular.

Their translations are slightly later, dating from the early 20th century. They only translated Tolstoy, aiming at translating his complete corpus, out if dissatisfaction with the many competing translations currently in existence - Tolstoy himself having waived his rights regarding translations. Louise concentrated on the fiction, and Aylmer on the religious philosophy.

No footnotes in the copy I have, but no attempts at "concept translation" either. The reader is treated as intelligent and capable of finding out who the Bashkirs are, for example.
No over prissiness - peasant dialogue sounds like natural English.

Memo to self: look for Maude translations of Tolstoy wherever possible.

The best book I have read on the subject of translation was Umberto Eco's Mouse or Rat: Translation as negotiation. As a polyglot and someone whose own work has been translated into many languages, and as someone who has translated many works, I felt he was ably placed to comment on translation.

He not only discussed the issues of translating cultural elements and the difficulties of translating works such as poetry, but also highlighted the translation of a work from one medium to another, such as from book to film.

I found this an informative and entertaining book. The translation story he tells that gave rise to the title of the book is very interesting.

@-pilgrim-, great idea for a thread.

>3 pgmcc: As I said when he discussed Mouse or Rat? earlier this year, although I admire Eco tremendously as a writer, he belongs to the patronising school of translation that I, personally, dislike.
https://www.librarything.com/topic/304136#6759082

Not a book, but I am watching a Russian television series called "Silver Spoon" on Netflix, two seasons and I'm on the second.

I've watched a lot of subtitled series, mostly from Asia (China/Japan), some from Scandinavia, some from India and some from Spanish speaking countries. All of varying quality. I am surprised at how familiar the Silver Spoon series is to me. The acting, story and subtitles are very much like what I am used to seeing in "United States" television. There are the obvious cultural differences, but not as many as I imagined there would be. The subtitles are seamless, meaning that I never have to question their meaning compared to what is going on in the show. I don't even find that when I watch British TV. Perhaps because the only words I know in Russian are Dah and Nyet? I wonder if part of the familiarity for me is that the songs/music are in English?

I don't think I'm clever enough to detect when translation is the issue in not caring for a book, but after several missteps with Alexandre Dumas and other writers, I have learned to at least try other versions before deciding to cross off an author.

I have always thought of Dorothy L. Sayers's translation of The Divine Comedy as the ultimate gold standard in translations. Not only is her text accurate, but she preserved the structure and rhyme scheme as well. There are necessarily voluminous notes and diagrams (which latter I have seen reproduced elsewhere in academic works as the best possible explanation of the medieval view of the universe; that alone says something), but these genuinely help and are kept to the end of each canto.

>5 MrsLee: With 11 official languages we have a lot of subtitled TV. Why do our lot insist on a colour scheme of white letters on a pale to white background? To me that's the first trap to avoid!

>6 hfglen: Still on my shelf to read, after reading someone else's translation which was a slog for me, I'm not in a hot hurry to try it again.

>7 hfglen: Yes, that would be difficult. Mostly our subtitles are in yellow? I believe I have seen white as well. Tiny ones are no good, either.

>8 MrsLee: I deeply sympathise. Somebody once gave me a Victorian translation into Blank Verse, which was dire. And incomprehensible. At least Ms. Sayers' version makes sense and is readable (among its other virtues).

I think I’ve mentioned Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter before. (Yes, the Douglas Hofstadter of Gödel, Escher, Bach.) It contains a series of translations of a very short poem by the 15th century French poet Clement Marot, as examples of how different a translation can be and still be a translation. (The book is 500-odd pages long and contains other things as well. Don’t read the chapter on the death of his wife—it will break your heart.)

>8 MrsLee: Thank you for the recommendation of "Silver Spoon".

I am currently watching the Russian fantasy horror TV series "Gogol" (basic premise, Gogol the writer is taken as clerk to a senior investigator, to the investigation of a series of murders near Dikanka village, where he becomes involved in supernatural events that relate to the contents of the stories that the actual author wrote).

There have been some interesting decisions made in the preparation of the episodes for the English market. Most notable is the renaming of the episodes. The titles for each episode appear quite clearly at the start (in Russian); each references a story or novel by Gogol. These have been replaced, in English, by episode titles which do relate too the contents of the episode, but do not necessarily have any connection to the Russian title. It seems clear that it has been assumed that no English viewer will have any familiarity with Gogol's work, and therefore the connections between the episodes and his writings will be meaningless to us.

In the dialogue, the decision has been made to translate the language of respect into the nearest English equivalent; so, for example:
"Nikolai Vasilievich" becomes "Mr Gogol"
Барин ("Barin") becomes "Master".

It also appears that, at times, passages of dialogue have been abbreviated in the subtitling.

But this is an exercise in interpretation, rather than translation. It it not sufficient to literally translate the actual dialogue, it had to keep pace with the action on the screen.

All in all, I thought it was handled rather well, particularly when elements of Russian peasant lore were involved (such as the meaning of a red scroll - an accusation of adultery - or a linden leaf - slang for "fake") which were important plot points that would be immediately understood by a Russian audience, but not a foreign one.

The assumption that we are all completely ignorant of Gogol's work rather amused me however - even the "Dead Souls" episode was renamed.

Taras Bulba and Other Tales - translated by John Cournos

John Cournos was born Ivan Grigorievich Korshun in the Russian Empire, in a Jewish family, and emigrated to the United States at the age of 10. Like Gogol, he was born in the Ukraine, and thus in a good position to be familiar with the

His first language was Yiddish, and later English. He studied Russian and German with a private tutor.

His translation seems very literal, keeping Russian idioms and using footnotes to explain them if it seems necessary.

He dates from the era when it was customary to translate Russian names phonetically, rather than following a transliteration scheme.

Given that Russian was not his first language, this does not make him an ideal translator for that language. However the literalness of his translation makes it less likely that anything will be lost because of this.

His era and background makes it probable that he was familiar with the folk manners and superstitions described, and his upbringing in Pennsylvania means that he is well positioned to identify what needs to be explained to an American audience.

Edit | More

I mentioned Le Ton Beau de Marot above (#11). The Wikipedia article on the book has some food for thought:

However, Hofstadter's reading of the idea of ‘translation’ goes deeper than simply that of translating between languages. Translation between frames of reference—languages, cultures, modes of expression, or indeed between one person's thoughts and another—becomes an element in many of the same concepts Hofstadter has addressed in prior works, such as reference and self-reference, structure and function, and artificial intelligence. ... One theme of this book is the loss of Hofstadter's wife Carol, who died of a brain tumor while the book was being written; she also created one of the numerous translations of Marot's poem presented in the book. In this context the poem dedicated to ‘a sick lady’ gained yet another deeply tragic and personal meaning, even though the translations were started long before her illness was even known. (Hofstadter went on to follow with an even more personal book titled I Am a Strange Loop after the death of his wife.)

One of the problems with reading Hofstadter is that you find that so many things are connected to so many other things. The universe is all one piece—pick up any bit of it and all the rest comes along.

Andrew Bromfield

I am having very mixed feelings about this translator. He is perhaps the best known, and best respected, translator of modern literature from Russian.

I met him first in his translations of the detective stories of Boris Akunin - which is no mean feat, given that each book is s pastiche of a different style in the genre - and the satires by Andrey Kurkov - which are often surreal, and again subject to abrupt changes in style.

I have also read Viktor Pelevin and Alexander Ikonnikov in his translations.

None of these authors are easy to translate, having a tendency to make complex allusions are deliberately use words with multiple possible interpretations. So, on balance, I would say that he was a translator that I would recommend.

I have just finished reading his translation of The Doomed City by the Strugatsky brothers.

One phrase stood out. A character is bad-temperedly bawling out someone whom he thinks is slacking on a public construction project by pointing out "you're working for yourself here", "not for someone else's uncle".

My impression is that exclamation sounds very odd, unless you are aware that "Uncle" is a term of respect used towards a high ranking underworld personage, and - by extension - a phrase for a "boss-man" figure who may be extorting your labour.

Andrew Bromfield lived in the USSR for several years. Does he really not know this? Or is this a deliberate stylistic choice to avoid showing awareness of "low" idioms?

Before the fall of the Soviet Union, understanding criminal idioms implied that you had been through the camps yourself, or knew someone who had. Although that was, in fact, true for large portions of the intelligentsia, it was also not something to be admitted casually.

However, in the nineties a lot of criminal jargon became part of popular culture (partly due to the popularity of films, TV series and books set in that milieu). I picked up a lot of this through Russian gangster films - but I also have Russian friends who refuse to translate such idioms for me, because "that is not language that a foreigner needs to know"!

So I am curious as to what is going on here. It is a small example - but it is a case where I do recognise the underlying idiom. I don't assume that I am always capable of doing do.

Is this part of the sense of "this is literature, it should not include such low language" - despite that, by quoting (quite deliberately without attribution) song lyrics from the shanson genre, the Strugatsky brothers were signalling their awareness and understanding of that subculture?

Or does the phrase sound completely comprehensible as it stands (and I am.making a mountain out of a molehill)?

>15 -pilgrim-: Mixed. I would understand “working for somebody’s uncle” to mean a suggestion that the job had been got through “connections”, which is not quite what you said. But it’s clearly intended to mean that a job had been got irregularly. I don’t know the wider context though. Assuming that Bromfield knew of the sense you mention, would it have been appropriate to say something like “... not for the mob”?

If you're unsure how many translated books you've read from your profile page you have a stats/memes tab that lists original language.

Generally I'm unable to tell when the source language was just badly written versus when a translator's just not written natural english. Many of my translated books don't quite read right though, something about the tone of the language interferes with the story. I note that my copy of the little prince was translated by Katherine Woods and I found it totally charming.

>16 haydninvienna: The speaker hales originally from 1950s Leningrad. He was a Komsomol member - a "true believer". In his new city, he is equally a believer in the ideology there. The context is that everyone, of whatever rank, is supposed to put in an hour's manual labour on a construction project, "for the good of the city" - i.e. like a Soviet era subbotnik. Hence he, having just found his own stint satisfying, is irritated at someone else grousing, because it is for the common good (hence, "for yourself") rather than there being someone else getting the profit from one's efforts.

That seems to pretty much the opposite of how you would naturally interpret the translation (which appears to have simply translated the phrase для дяди literally).

As far as I understand it, in general, there is no implication about how the job was obtained; it is a comment on who profits.

>17 reading_fox:
I know the feeling. When reading Oliver Pötzsch's historical novels, translated by Lee Chadeayne, there is an awful lot of terrible, anachronistic language - but I have no way to know whether that was what the author used, or whether it was introduced by the ineptitude of the translator.

The problem is that a book in translation requires two talents working on it; a mediocre translator can destroy a masterpiece, but a good one can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

I tend to notice the translation style from Russian particularly, because I am sometimes able to recognise literally translated idioms like this.

I remember a particularly egregious one in the translation of a Russian war memoir which described the cooks as having "noodles behind their ears":
1. Russian field rations did not include noodles
2. "having noodles behind one's ears" is the Russian equivalent of wet behind the ears (British) or a greenhorn (American).
But unless one knows the Russian idiom, the natural assumption would be that Russian soldiers have an interesting diet!

>16 haydninvienna:, >18 -pilgrim-:

It has been niggling at me: it is one thing to criticise a translation, but how, then, would I do it better?

For для дяди:
It is a slang expression; the nearest English equivalent that I can think of is "working for The Man".

But that is rather specifically a 1960s Americanism, which would sound odd coming out of the mouth of a 1950s Leningrader.

And yes, substituting a phrase whose primary reference is "the Establishment" for one that references crime lords might seem odd; to a certain Russian mindset, there is no difference, because it assumes that to have got to a position of influence, one must have used less than legal methods. What they have in common is the sense that the ordinary guy is being screwed.

And problems like this (over a simple, common phrase) is why I have great respect for the work of good translators.

>20 -pilgrim-: Isn't this also an aspect of the more general problem that "the past is a different country"? To read any book set in another milieu, time or place, or written in another language than the one we are familiar with, we have to know some context. If I were to read a book set in Australia, in the law-abiding urban middle class, any time between about 1950 and 2005, I'm in a familiar context. Change any one of those (different social class, rural for urban, "arty" instead of middle-class, etc, etc) and there is immediately the possibility of misunderstandings--probably minor ones, but misunderstandings all the same. If I move the focus to another country, or another time, or another social class, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding. If I have to read the book through a translation, there is another layer of possible misunderstanding, the translator's as well as my own. No translation is perfect--it's not even clear to me what "perfect translation" means. But I think that in your specific example in >15 -pilgrim-: , the translator is trying to find an equivalent for a concept that has no precise equivalent outside its own context. Granted, your suggestion of "working for the Man" is close, but the very fact that you suggested "working for the Man", and I suggested "working for the Mob", neither of which is exactly the idea that you explained, shows the difficulty quite neatly.

>21 haydninvienna: I agree with you completely. And, like in our "the past is another country" discussion, the difference should be accepted and embraced. People are indeed people everywhere, but environment and circumstance produce very different experiences, so to pretend otherwise is insulting, and will make what one is reading fundamentally incomprehensible.

That is why I don't, personally, like the current "no footnotes, no glossary" fashion in translation. I would prefer an explanation to an imperfect analogy.

How, for example, would you begin to translate a subbotnik?

>22 -pilgrim-: I'm going to assume that your question about how to translate subbotnik was rhetorical. I don't know Russian at all, so couldn't even begin to answer of my own knowledge. But given your explanation, I think that I (assuming that I were translating the Strugatsky book) would leave it untranslated, probably set in italics to emphasise its unusualness, and give pretty much the explanation that you gave on the basis that there isn't a Western equivalent—the nearest I know of would be corvée labour, which I was surprised to discover existed in parts of the USA into the 20th century. There are probably many people who wouldn't find the expression "corvée labour" much help.

>23 haydninvienna: The literal meaning of a subbotnik was working Saturday "voluntarily", without pay, in addition to normal Monday to Friday work. Immediately after the October Revolution it was genuinely voluntary; later, well, lack of enthusiasm could be bad for your health, so when asked to voluntarily work, there was only one possible answer. Hence the term came to refer to any corvée labour.

Fortunately for the translator, since The Doomed City is not Leningrad (no, really, honest) then the Strugatskys never use the term subbotnik.

However it does come up in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf - one of my favourite post-Soviet novels - by Viktor Pelevin, which is explicitly set in modern Russia.

(And you have piqued my curiosity with that mention of corvée labour in twentieth century America...)

>24 -pilgrim-: I don’t know any more than that, unfortunately. I knew about the corvée system in early modern Europe from long-ago history studies, but when I googled the word (basically to make sure I got the spelling right) the Wikipedia article told me about corvée in, inter alia, the USA.

Translators can indeed make or break a text. I love the 1913 Hilaire Belloc translation of J. Bedier's retelling of The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, a compilation of versions of the renowned 12th-century "high tale of love and of death." The beauty of the language elevates the drama of this tragic romance.

I have just read Master of the Day of Judgment, written in German by Leo Perutz and translated by Eric Mosbacher.

The book was written in 1921 in German, and set in 1909. The narrator is a German-speaking aristocrat.

I found the translation invisible, in the sense that I never noticed an awkward phrase, or anachronistic idiom.

But I noticed the difference in register between the first line in this translation and that listed on LibraryThing:
I have finished the job. (Mosbacher)
versus
My task is accomplished.

My instinctive feeling is that the aristocratic narrator, leaving a memoir for posterity, would be more likely to write in the formal register here.
BUT
Eric Mosbacher seems like an interesting chap. After graduating from Cambridge in French and Italian, he spent most of his career as a newspaperman, then working as a translator, often in partnership with his wife Gwenda David. His translations include both fiction and non-fiction, with a certain emphasis on psychology and Jewish topics.

However, during World War II, He first worked as an interpreter in the interrogation of Italian prisoners-of-war, and then, as part of the Political Warfare Executive, produced a German language newspaper to be dropped on Germany every night, after the war travelling to the Rhineland to help set up a free press. He left the army with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.

Given his career as a senior propaganda officer, I would expect him to be attuned to the nuances of register, and also with how W officers speak. But maybe not to the formality of an earlier period?

Has anyone read this in the German original? How formal is Baron Yosch, officer and gentleman, in his prologue? And in his regular speech in the main body of the narrative?

I am reading The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way, an anonymous religious work, in a translation by Olga Savin.

I also read this many years ago, in, I think, the Helen Bacovain translation.

Ms Savin seems more willing to keep the original Russian terminology - starets, chotki, lapti, oonochki, basmaki - for words for which there is not a direct English equivalent, and then explain them properly in her Glossary.

She is not always completely consistent - sometimes using Matryoshkaand sometimes little mother, for example.

But the language comes across as simple, and without archaisms. It is easy to read.

A quote from Vasily Zhukovsky, which I thought sums up the translator's art (regarding translating poetry):

Переводчик в прозе - раб, переводчик в поэзии - сам поэт.

The translator into prose is a slave, the translator into poetry is himself a poet.

I have been watching a Russian fantasy historical detective series, recently, Detective Anna. Since my Russian has deteriorated abominably, I am watching with English subtitles enabled.

The results are, on the whole, good - apart from one episode where the subtitles for some sentences had been left in Russian! They read as natural English, rather than the over literalness than results when the translator is not fluent in the target language.

But it is evident that the translator has simply been provided with the script in Russian, and is translating that, rather than watching the series, or following its plot. I sometimes wonder whether different parts of the script have been farmed out to different individuals.

One particular example: a man receives an unsigned telegram that read, according to the subtitles: This romance is over. I do not want to see her again.
Which, in the context of the story, was an "Er, what?" We had only seen the recipient act as the agent of a female employer.

So I froze the screen and read the telegram myself.
The first sentence was "this роман is finished. Now роман (roman) did mean "romance", but like in many other European languages, it also retains the more general sense of "story".

Second sentence (literal): "I do not want to see его again".
Now the accusative third person pronoun его can mean either "him" or "her". Since this is set in the 19th century, when a man choosing to send an affair and tell another man about it, the translator opted for "her".

Correctly translated, the telegram reads: This story is over. I do not want to see him again.

The female political intriguer the recipient should for has been disatisfied with the performance of another agent, and has dismissed him. Instead of accepting this, he has travelled to the town where his uncompleted mission (which he had subcontracted and which had been badly botched) was to have taken place. (As the viewers have seen earlier in the episode.) The recipient of the telegram is her local operative in that town.

Her new operative does not survive the next episode, having been last seen in the company of the telegram recipient.

In the context of the true contents of the telegram, this all makes perfect sense.

But, with the subtitles provided, it sounded if the woman was romantically linked to the agent's "true employer" - or something. A major red herring was unintentionally provided.

That is a fine example of how a good translator can unintentionally go astray, if they do not also understand the meaning of what they are translating, due to lacking context.

I came across a fascinating article about the problems with machine translation, and specifically Google, here:
https://algorithmwatch.org/en/story/google-translate-gender-bias/

It explains how gender inclusivity is stripped out of translations by the user of English as a bridging language.

If there are not enough examples of language A being translated into language B on the Internet, then Google works by translating text from language A into English, and then from English into language B.

The problem is that languages A and B may use different nouns for male and female members of a given profession, whilst English does not. So when A had a male member of a traditionally female profession, or vice versa, the translation back out of English takes the "most probable" gender.

It is an extension of the pronoun gender issue in >30 -pilgrim-:.

Why this is a real problem is that it is now combined with Google "helpfully" automatically translating webpages that are in a language other than your device's settings. And it is very easy to click "always translate this language", when faced with a language of which you know nothing. After all, I am never going to be reading a webpage in the original Chinese, am I? But thereafter, every page that is written in Chinese will be automatically translated for me - without notifying me.

And that is the danger. It doesn't require a deliberate agenda. The simple, but hidden, mechanics of automatic translation can distort meaning.

So, a mixed delegation at a conference is described as being all male (or all female). If this was say, a team of doctors at a conference on abortion, wouldn't that affect your perception of the country who sent them?

I read web pages in Russian as well as on English. Yet I now find them autotranslated on my phone, with just a little tab at the bottom asking me if I really want to see the actual (Russian) text.

I am not a foe of machine translation. It is a very useful said when you want to get the gist of a passage, particularly if you do not know the language at all.

But, as @pgmcc was saying at the beginning of this thread (over a year ago!) there are always going to ambiguities and cultural nuances from context, which will prevent it being completely accurate.

It is the fact that the mechanical translation is being presented without the caveat that it is a translation that worries me. We can take on board that a translation may have issues, even if we don't know enough about the languages involved to predict them. But only if we know that translation has taken place.