I've recently joined ProZ, a wonderful translators' web community, where I started to participate in some discussions and answer various translation questions (there is a forum where you can accumulate points for answering such questions, in hopes that a potential employer may use that to gauge your "real" expertise in a field). I continue to be amazed at how much I still have to learn, and the extent to which some of the questions asked stump me is almost comical ("remittance leveraging," anyone?). All in all, I'm learning a lot and I'm enjoying myself.
Some questions are in fields so specialized that there is no way even a normal native speaker would know the term in question. I am still amazed at how tough the translator's job must be when he/she is translating concepts that have basically no equivalent in his/her native language, not to mention that in some fields the terminology is still fluid. All in all, juggling these terms is extremely complicated--hats off to those who do so on a regular basis.
Yesterday, I participated in answering a question that raised some interesting issues for me. The question was, how do you translate "Sorcova vesela" into English? (The whole thread is here.)
"Sorcova" is one of those ancient folk customs in which, on New Year's Day, kids go around with a little stick adorned with flowers and tap someone's shoulder to wish them all the best in the New Year. They also sing a cute little song. Sorcova means only that, the little flower-wrapped stick, so it's a highly idiosyncratic word with no equivalent in English. Thus, the first answer that comes to mind is: you don't translate it. No more than you'd translate "Greensleeves" through "mâneci verzi." Or "Auld Lang Syne" through...gee, I don't know, really.
But then one of the respondents wrote hey, the whole thing has been translated already (the song and all), and copied the whole translation in there. Everybody agreed that that's a very good translation, very sweet, very well done; it helped, I guess, that the translation apparently belongs to Ion Minulescu, one of our best-known poets. As an aside, I did not know he did this, I could find no reference to the fact that he translated anything into English, plus he died in the 1940s, so really, I'm not sold on that reference, plus I'm deeply mistrustful of Romanian web references, for reasons I won't go into here. But let's roll with it and say he did translate the "Sorcova" song. What I respectfully would like to say here is, it's not really a translation. To illustrate, I will provide the original, a literal translation, then my (deeply flawed) attempt at translating it with the original rhyme pattenr; and then I'll provide the alleged Minulescu translation. Ready? Here goes:
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Sorcova, vesela, Să trăiţi, să-mbătrâniţi, Peste vară, primăvară, Ca un păr, ca un măr, Ca un fir de trandafir Tare ca piatra, Iute ca săgeata, Tare ca fierul, Iute ca oţelul. La anul şi la mulţi ani! |
Sorcova, merry one,
May you live long, may you grow old, Over summer, over spring, Like a pear tree, like an apple tree, Like a rose stem Tough like a rock Fast like an arrow Tough like iron, Fast like steel. Happy New Year! |
Dogwood twig, merry sprig,
May you live long, may you grow strong, And the spring will summer bring, Like a cherry tree so merry, Like a rose tuberose, Tough as a stone, Sharp as a bone, Tough like iron grip, Sharp as a steel tip. Happy New Year! |
Now here's the alleged Minulescu translation:
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The Wishing Carol |
Pretty, isn't it It gets the spirit of the song beautifully, no doubt; it expresses the same warm sentiments; it loosely follows and "translates" the ideas in the original folk songs. But a translation of the original? Hardly. The original is a simple folk song that accompanies an ancient tradition. I have researched this a little bit and "sorcova" comes from the bulgarian сурва̀кам, another super-idiosyncratic word which means, literally, "to wish a Happy New Year by tapping someone's back with a decorated cornel twig"--which is exactly what the Romanian verb, "sorcovi," means. Cornel is a kind of dogwood, hence my translation. And the ancient tradition did require that "sorcova" be made of such dogwood twigs, artificially forced into bloom for that occasion (nowadays, the flowers are made of colored paper tied to a stick).
The folk song is formulaic, with internal rhymes and impenetrable similes ("tare ca piatra" etc.), hardened by usage into self-contained lexical units that don't easily crack open to be translated or interpreted. While the "Minulescu" translation does a beautiful job of interpreting and unpacking some of those meanings, the quasi-hypnotic rhythm of the original is lost. Really, there is little left of it in that version. The version is very literate--which is to say, not folk-ish at all--in its choice of vocabulary, the use of a title, of stanzas, of complex syntactic units (just look at that second stanza) that do not echo the simplicity and cadence of the original. Plus, there are about extra 8 lines in there.
Of course, I am aware that any good translation is just a good interpretation or approximation of the original--just take a peek at my site's title. But I think that, in order to qualify as a translation, a text has to strive to reproduce the intentions, format, meaning, and (very importantly!) sound of the original--not just its general direction. The "Minulescu" translation does not qualify as a translation--it does qualify as a poem in its own right, a pretty one at that, one that reinterprets in a modern manner the spirit of the original. But, in my opinion, it's a re-writing at best, and hardly a translation.
What do you think? Where do you draw the line between a translation and a "new" work of art only loosely based in the original? Are there "degrees" of translation? Is there any way to define them? What are the points on the continuum that we're looking at?
And don't tell me that you prefer a beautiful reinterpretation to a flawed but more faithful translation. I get that already!
