Everyone of us has read a book in which a given character’s accent is rendered graphically, by altering the spelling of what he says. It’s a simple and very effective technique, much more so than describing the way a character talks. Of course, it’s important not to abuse it, ma it’s probably the best method of conveying a foreign accent. What happens, though, when a translator is faced with such a character?
In The Pilo Family Circus (published in Italy as La città dei clown), a book that I mentioned a while back, there is a character named Mugabo, an African magician. The way in which Will Elliott renders his accent graphically made me think of a francophone African accent: Mugabo says ‘treek’, ‘peeg’, ‘geev’ and ‘sometheeng’ (instead of ‘trick’ ‘pig’, ‘give’ and ‘something’), or ‘ze’ and ‘zis’ (‘the’ and ‘this’). Basically he stretches the ‘i’s turning them into ‘ee’s and can’t pronounce the ‘th’ phoneme properly.
In Chelsea Handler’s deadly funny Are you there, Vodka? It’s me Chelsea (Vodka, ci sei? Sono io, Chelsea, Strade Blu Mondadori), there was a chinese massage therapist (or maybe not) saying ‘wicense’, ‘cwothes’ and ‘wesbian’ (‘license’, ‘clothes’ and ‘lesbian’) or ‘fuhst’ and ‘dollah’ (‘first’ and ‘dollars’). As stereotypical as they might be, the usual, well-know problems with ‘l’s and ‘r’s.
In Ron Currie Jr.’s stunning Everything Matters! (soon to be published as Ogni cosa è importante! by Strade Blu Mondadori in Italy) there is a flight attendant, whose South American accent is rendered with words like ‘ree-fill’ (‘refill’), ‘ello’ (‘hello’), ‘choo’ (‘you’). He makes the ‘i’s longer, too, skips more than one ‘h’ and pronounces his ‘y’s as if they were ‘j’s as I think is commonplace in the Spanish of some Latin American countries.
My approach to these little translation problems is as simple as it is fun. First of all I translate the character’s lines correctly, given that any accent, twisting single phonemes, will obviously affect different words in English and Italian. Then, in order to determine which ones, I simply start sounding off that character’s lines with the relevant accent, and change the spelling accordingly. Maybe it’s because I’ve always had quite a knack for impressions, and for accents in particular, but it seems to work.
So, Mugabo the magician in Italian says ‘gonillio’ ‘gazzo’ and ‘guesto’ (‘coniglio’, ‘cazzo’ and ‘questo’) ‘palliaccio’ (‘pagliaccio’) o ‘piasce’ (‘piace’). Basically, his hard ‘c’s are too hard, his soft ‘c’s too soft, and he has problem (as most non-Italian speakers) with the sound ‘gli’.
The chinese massage therapist, says ‘pagale plima’ (‘pagare prima’) and so on,although I also tried to turn her ‘s’ into a ‘z’ as in ‘Met-ta quezto zu zuo zedele’ (‘Metta questo sul suo sedere’) and ‘lezbi-kah’ (‘lesbica’).
Alfredo, on the other hand, says ‘Me serve altro café’ (‘mi serve altro caffè’), ‘Tuto bene’ (‘tutto bene’) and ‘Hai tirrato l’agua tipo venti vuolte’ (‘hai tirato l’acqua tipo venti volte’), underlining the Spanish speaker’s trouble with the Italian double consonants, and on the other hand the long rolling that makes ‘r’s longer in Spanish than they are in Italian. For lack of an appropriate grapheme, I had to give up my idea of merging his ‘b’s and ‘v’s in that intermediate sound that is one of the distinctive traits of most Spanish accents.
So, basically, what I do is determining what kind of accent a character has, simulate that accent on their lines in Italian, and it’s done. Anyone out there using a different method? Or wanting to share an example of some other accents which were interesting to translate?
Smuggled Words 
Here you discuss the “translation” of an accent foreign to both the original and the target language. How would you handle the harder problem of a dialect? (Assume, e.g., that you have an English text where one of the characters speaks a spelled-out Cockney.) Alternatively, consider an English text containing Italian phrases, or an Italian accent on English phrases, that is now to be translated into Italian.
(I am not myself a translator, so I have no own preferred technique to offer.)
Welcome, Michael, and thanks for your excellent question.
Let’s start with the English dialect, as I’ve been there recently, while translating Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto, where there’s a fair bit of Southern American English. As you can imagine, you can’t replace a regional accent from the source language with another regional accent in the target language without destroying the whole context – “Hey, why is this Texan hillbilly speaking Sicilian?!?” – so, in that case, all you can do is trying to convey as much as possible through other means. In the case of under-educated working-class Texan characters, in Italian I used what we call a sociolect, a variation of the standard language which is determined by social factors, as opposed to the geographical factor defining a dialect. It is a massive loss, but unofortunately an inevitable one.
As for an Italian accent on English phrases, there’s a few options. If it’s only a generic Italian accent, it might need to be lost in translation, as we say, and, should if fit the style of the narration, you could throw in a couple of reference to the character having an accent. Alternatively, if there is enough information about the character’s background, you could go for regional nuances in the Italian version (for example, the stereotypical Sicilian mafia guy would have a more specifically Sicilian accent in the Italian version).
It’s about compromising, and accepting the inevitability of a few losses… It’s things like these that show why Umberto Eco once called translation the art of failure…
Thank you for answer: While it turned out to be in the ballpark of what I had expected, it is always interesting to get a professionals view.
Your Umberto Eco quote matches my experiences as a reader well—-it is not a matter of succeeding or failing, but of failing in a way that does as little injustice to the original as possible, while still giving the reader enough support. Sadly, I have seen a number of cases of entertainment literature where the translator was either grossly negligent or completely out of his depth. (Notably, several of the German Discworld translations are such that I have actually repeatedly contemplated sending a written complaint to the publisher or an FYI to the author…) Fortunately, the “higher” the literature, the higher the competence and conscientiousness of the translator seems to be.
You’re very welcome, it’s always a pleasure to have a curious reader!
I couldn’t agree more on your view of translating as “doing as little injustice to the original as possible”, and I wish all readers were as attentive as you are to the process involved! Thanks.
[…] Another little translation challenge was that of a Spanish-speaking flight attendant, whose accent was rendered graphically with some unorthodox spelling (see here). […]