Translating Scat – how do you choose the ‘right’ register in English?

Is a taste for ‘scat’ humour cultural? (Sorry, no pun intended!) Reading Cindy Carter’s recent piece Studies in Scat: Excerpts from Yu Hua, Zhu Wen and Li Er about the Chinese scatological sense of humour started me thinking.

What to do if your editor doesn’t like all this talk of crap? My translation of Han Dong’s 扎根, which will appear in English as Banished!, is at the copy-editing stage. The copy editor has put a lot of careful work into correcting my ‘infelicities’ (lovely word!) of expression for which I am extremely grateful, but we have one major disagreement. It’s – you’ve guessed it – the language used to translate those ‘toilet functions’!

There’s plenty of crap in this novel, for a variety of reasons. The story is about life in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Shit (human and animal) is essential for growing good crops. Then again, Chinese attitudes to shitting is surely much more matter-of-fact than in the West, where it’s still all a bit unmentionable. (For proof of that, watch some of those recent British TV ads for laxatives where attractive young women talk about ‘slow digestion’ and ‘bloating’). And Han Dong’s style is deliberately plain-speaking, as well as humorous.

The problem is in the choice of words to translate all this into English. We can go for colloquial words from Old or Middle English – ‘crap’ or ‘shit’ – or the Latin/Greek-based ‘defecate’ or (perish the thought) we can even ‘have a bowel movement’, depending whether we are visiting the doctor or talking to a child. (For an amusing attempt to explain these intricacies to Chinese learners of English, see, 厕所里的词汇) The fact is Chinese does not have the range of expressions which we can employ in English. And that’s where the problem starts.

To put this in context, I should say that Han Dong’s narrative is not particularly comic or ribald. If that was the case, then my translation would be – without question – ribald, comic and slangy. On the whole, his novel is gentle, sometimes lyrical, generally plain and factual. But when the writing goes from sober narrative to scatological humour, the copy editor says she finds it disconcerting, and wonders what the tenor of the novel was supposed to be. For her, my choice of words sound ‘jarring’, even slightly confusing: when the grandfather, who is chronically constipated, (finally) ‘has a crap’, it sounds disrespectful because he is an elderly gent, and she thinks it would fit better if I used more neutral language like ‘have a bowel movement’.

You’ll have guessed by now that I have gone for informal register rather than the formal/medical, depending on the context. For children I’ve used ‘poo’, for adults, ‘crap’. The dogs in northern Jiangsu licked children’s ‘assholes’ clean, not their ‘anuses’.

This is almost a reversal of the ‘lost in translation’ problem: to some degree I, as translator, did have a choice about what register to choose, given the almost infinite variety of expressions that English provides.

I’d like the views of other Chinese>English translators on the following thoughts I’ve had:

1. Choosing terms in a particular register (formal/medical; or colloquial/slangy) is equivalent to choosing a style. As translators, we aim to transfer the original style to the best of our ability into the target language, don’t we? But perhaps we kid ourselves that we are merely ‘transferring’ – at least in languages as different as English and Chinese. 

2. I am aware I was making a personal stylistic choice in using the informal words (‘crap’, not ‘defecate’). That was a judgment I had to make. On what basis did I decide? Well, I based it on my gut feeling that the informal words fitted with the tenor of the rest of the novel. At the same time, I am sensitive to the editor’s concerns – after all, she represents the future readers of the published translation.

3. In rendering Han Dong’s style, I have tried to convey what I judge to be his intentions: to write a narrative which is ‘earthy’ in several different senses (hence the ‘plain speaking’), as well as subtle, touching, even lyrical in places. However, what if my slangy scat vocabulary leaves the English-language readers ‘jarred’ and confused? In that case, the style I’ve chosen could conflict with the author’s intentions. (But would the reader find it less jarring if I chose a more formal register? Eg ‘defecate’. I doubt it.)

4. In some cases, as those of us at the Moganshan workshops know, the translator can ask the author’s opinion, but it is hard to do this if s/he doesn’t know any English, especially where we are talking about an ‘absence’ in the source language.
In defence of stylistic/cultural differences in general, I firmly believe that readers can and do get used to new reading experiences. After all, part of the attraction of reading translations is introducing us to culturally different worlds.

5. Finally, this issue of choosing the right register in English arises in other situations too – erotic passages in novels, for instance. (And please don’t tell me I’m one-(two-) track minded!).

Anyone else faced the same challenges and/or reactions?