Dear all,
once again, sorry about the long absence. With a 6-month-old baby girl and a 6-week trip to Italy so that Nonno, Nonna and Zia could finally meet her I did not manage to find the discipline to update at all. After all, work/life balance is a hot concept right now, is it not? In any case, I assume most of you survived. In case you’re still hanging around here, I finally give you a .pdf of my presentation at the recent AAL Conference about Literature and Translation. It’s called Translation as Re-creation and you can read it here. Enjoy, and stay tuned.
—
Carissimi,
ancora una volta mi devo scusare per la lunga assenza. Tra una bimba di sei mesi e un viaggio in Italia di sei settimane di modo che il nonno, la nonna e la zia potessero finalmente conoscerla, non sono riuscito a trovare la disciplina di aggiornare il blog. Ma dopotutto il concetto di equilibro fra vita e lavoro è parecchio in voga, ultimamente, no? In ogni caso immagino che siate sopravvissuti quasi tutti. Nel caso in cui siate ancora in giro per questo blog, finalmente vi presento il testo che ho presentato alla recente conferenza dell’AAL alla Monash University di Melbourne. Si è parlato di letteratura e traduzione, e il titolo della mia relazione era Translation as Re-creation. Potete leggerla qui. Buona lettura, e restate sintonizzati.
Smuggled Words 
Thanks for posting. Hope you had a lovely time.
I agree with you in that I sometimes have the impression that translators are taught to overprotect readers by means of adapting ”way too much”. What ”way too much” is, that remains a mystery.
However ”enriching” is a tricky concept because, as we know, languages are not innocuous entities which exist in a neutral beautiful reality in which all of them are regarded equally important. As a speaker of one of these languages that new generations avoid speaking, as they are seen as second rate languages (Galician, which has a common root with Portuguese), I understand why the idioms from the target one are used. In this case, it serves a purpose: to promote those traditional expressions that are slowly waning away.
Don’t take me wrong, I think in a world as globalized as the one we live in, we long for ”the different”. And readers have the right to enjoy, as long as it does not undermine its comprehensibility or makes it a hard task to read a book, the original wording of the text.
All I would like to highlight is that language relative power has to be borne in mind before adopting a translation strategy that entails reproducing structures form the source into the target text; and that ”enriching” can actually end up meaning ”taking over”. Finding the balance, and knowing what language combinations are to be treated with caution, is the translator task*.
Having said that, I enjoyed reading the essay 🙂
*(or the editors, or the publishers, etc :S)
Hi, there! Thanks for dropping by.
I totally agree with what you say, and i certainly do not think that we should “reproduce structures” from the source text. We can, though, introduce new nuances of meaning, new words, new expressions, within the boundaries (or maybe just an inch beyond the boundaries) of what is acceptable and enjoyable in the target language.
Also, I can very much relate to your worries about supposed “second rate languages” waning away. I am from Italy, which had/has a wealth of regional languages, each one with its own history, literature, and so on. Unfortunately, nation-building concerns under Mussolini led to us labeling them as “dialects” and writing them off as a sign of provincialism. The result is that we are quickly losing them, especially in the more industrialsed northern areas. I can understand Ligurian, but do not speak it, and I can safely bet it will be extinct in 50 years or so. And this is indeed a massive cultural loss, and a perfectly avoidable one at that.
Still, I always feel compelled to point out that languages naturally evolve, and the abnormality is neither the transformation or the merging of languages, nor the so-called “takeovers”, but rather this idea that languages are pure entities that should not change or should only change on their own and not under external influences. That’s always happened, and that’s why we have all the wealth of languages we have today. Think of the many varieties of vulgar Latin which evolved into dozens of other languages (including Galician), which in turn influenced each other over the course of two millennia. Think of the Normans invading England, where French and Anglo-Saxon mixed in a mish-mash which would have horrified today’s purists but which ended up creating the English language. I really think that the inherent absurdity of hardcore language protection is an overlooked topic, and that political correctness has led us to fear the very process which created the languages we now love so much. I reckon we should learn to let languages flow, and enjoy it.
Anyway, that’s another topic, which I might write something about in the future, maybe.
Thanks again for the visit!
GMB
Tell me about it. I was just discussing that with a student of mine who thinks Spanglish is ”simply outrageous”. He didn’t say it, but he didn’t need to. I told him I thought that, on the contrary, it was amazing, as it was the fruit of the intertwining not only of two languages, but of tons of dialects, and that smoothly playing with those codes was the natural course of conversation for someone living in such a multilingual situation.
After five years of college indoctrination during which I have been told innumerable times about the allegedly importance of speaking ”properly”, enjoying what I think is not only a natural, but a fascinating phenomenon, is my little revenge ;P
As for where the line lies between a language and a dialect… that is a hard one. I once read that a language is a dialect with an army.
In my case, I can confidently say that at a linguistic level I have more in common with a Portuguese than I do with many Latin Americans. That’s neither good, nor bad, It just shows how in many respects clearly distinct languages are overlooked as dialects, and languages spoken by hundreds of millions of people all over the world are artificially contained under the same label.
Whatever the answer, there will always remain something of those ”future lost” languages or dialects, you name it, in the structures or lexicon of the area. And that is indeed, although not much, a good reminder of how the way a language will evolve is hard to foresee, and how no matter how vulnerable, the so called dialects always find a way to survive, if only by living within ”real languages” which did survive.
But that is indeed a different topic. I hope you eventually write about it. Oh, well, you never know. Anyway, thanks for writing.
T.