Translation: Tilting towards Foreignizing Nowadays?
Russian-to-English translator Marian Schwartz:
...our taste for foreignness has increased. A simple example: 50 years ago, names of Chinese characters were translated — “Peach Blossom’’ and the like — whereas now the preference is for the transliterated Chinese names. There is an ongoing debate among translators about “foreignizing’’ and “domestication,’’ but wherever a translator’s choice falls, today it will probably be closer to foreignizing than it would have been 50 years ago.
Comments
I thought this was a great interview, & I agree with this excerpted comment in general. In particular, though, I'm not sure that a translation of a name such as "Peach Blossom" is any more or less foreignizing than transliterating the Chinese name.
Lucas
Lucas Klein, April 6, 2010, 11:20p.m.
That example "Lucas" cites above kind of represents my objection to her whole point. We have a better stomach for foreignness, perhaps -- readers here can handle X's and Qs and such -- but I don't think we have a taste for it.
She might have forgotten what translations were like 100 years ago. Translators today don't have to treat philosophical texts like religious texts, characters don't have to be mysterious and wise, we don't have an industry of people selling the sensualized, opium-addled 'oriental' to deal with...what we do have is still a significant amount of ignorance about Chinese, for example when a character's name is used allegorically (like the maid Chunxiang in Peony Pavilion) and when it's just someone's name. The former was common in pre-May 4th literature, the latter is pretty much the standard (with exceptions) now. After all, we wouldn't translate 'Smith' as 'forger of iron.'
I think she's reacting at heart to the re-exoticization of Russian literature; there was a period during which it was seen to be the forefront of world literature, and now you can't even really read Karamazov in college courses. I think to English speakers, the most famous publication coming out of Russia in the last 20 years was "the eXile", which a) how sad is that, and b) did a lot to make Russia seem like a magical forest full of drunk beasts.
tonton, April 9, 2010, 8:31a.m.