There are congruences between languages that are more closely related, of course, but those relationships are very much in the minority. Anything that is, itself, a ‘linguistic’ quality will by definition be anchored in a particular language - whether it’s idiom, ambiguity, or assonance. So it’s always interpretative, approximate, creative. There’s not a single word in any of the languages I translate that can map perfectly onto a word in English. Translation is impossible! And I don’t just mean it’s really, really difficult, but really, it’s not actually possible. What linguistic qualities are the hardest to translate? That distinction, I believe, is very telling.
García Márquez has been misquoted often as saying the translation of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ was better than the original - I think he actually said it was more accurate than the original. We have to take an original word with two or three possible simultaneous meanings and plump for an English word which only covers one or two of those - but there’s a gain that comes with that sharp focus, too. People talk about ‘loss’ in translation, which seems to me to be missing the point mostly, though one thing that does seem to me to be a particular, frequent loss is ambiguity. They are constantly making choices about which elements of a text to preserve and foreground, and which to sacrifice. Translators read the original piece and try to work out what it’s doing, what’s important that’s going on. This means there will be additions, of course, but it will also draw attention to certain things in the original.Įvery translation is an interpretative act, as well as a creative one. Every word or phrase every syllable, for that matter, will be different from the original text. Sure, in translation, everything changes.
Taking something living and fresh and transforming it into something dull and dead in another language doesn’t seem like genuine faithfulness to me.Ĭan a translation add something to the original? It should have just the same pulse as the original did. Assuming the faithfulness you’re aiming for is fidelity to something more than just literal meaning, then any attempt at being faithful to the original piece of writing should entail making something that lives. So how do you translate literature effectively? The British Council’s Ted Hodgkinson spoke to Daniel Hahn, director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, and Urdu language translator Fahmida Riaz, during a literary translation workshop taking place in Karachi on 13-17 October.ĭaniel Hahn, should a good translation faithfully capture the original text, or make something with a distinctive life of its own? ‘Poetry is what gets lost in translation’, the American poet Robert Frost is quoted as saying.
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