Translations rhyming (orig Re: Welsh song)
thomas breuel
|example, I saw (Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach) something called the
|English French German Suite, which was a translation of Jabberwocky
|(from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass) into French and German.
|For those who do not know, this is a mostly nonsense poem with many
|invented words. The translation is (to me, who knows little French and
|next to no German) very good, especially considering the magnitude of
|the task.
As for the German translation, it isn't very good (just one
of the many examples of inaccuracies and superficial treatments
in Goedel, Escher, Bach).
Even though it is hard to tell (since it is a non-sense
poem, after all), there are several grammatical inaccuracies
in it. The most blatant mistake is the translation of 'beware'
by 'bewahre'. Translated back into English, the translation
of 'Beware the Jabberwock' becomes 'Preserve of the week of misery'.
Translating the Jabberwock is a comparativly easy task, I would
say, since semantic mistakes are very unlikely to be noticed.
Of course, finding a German word which evokes the same associations
as, say, 'slithy', is impossible, but this mistake is hardly
going to be noticed or significant. Far more serious, in my opinion,
is the fact that (even young) German speakers usually do not
encounter limitations in their vocabulary every day, and that
therefore a poem made up out of non-sense words probably
sounds much more unnatural to German than to English ears.
As soon as fine points of semantics or culture get involved,
an accurate translation becomes nearly impossible. The word
'nobility', for example, has entirely different connotations
in English than it has in German. Even an accurate translation
of the 'Lebensansichten des Katers Murr' (the beginning of which
I posted in a TRanslation into aUI some time ago on net.nlang)
will simply not mean the same thing to an American than it will
to a German, for example, because the German reader of this 19th
century novel probably has an entirely different view of 'nobility'
than an American or Englishman (nevertheless, I highly recommend
the book. It was written by E.T.A. Hoffmann, one of the (many)
literary geniuses of 19th century Germany. It portrays society
from the point of view of a cat (100 years before 'I am a cat'),
but (:-)) it is also very enjoyable to read).
Finally, there are stylistic and grammatical limitations on
the 'translatability' of poetry. In German, individual phrases
frequenly have well-defined grammatical functions even if
word-order is changed. This makes changes in word order much
more natural and common than in English. To translate deliberate
grammatical ambiguities of English poetry, or to capture the
terseness and semantic ambiguity of Chinese poetry in German
is, on the other hand, difficult for this very reason.
Thomas.
Jeff Lichtman
> Of course, finding a German word which evokes the same associations
> as, say, 'slithy', is impossible, but this mistake is hardly
> going to be noticed or significant. Far more serious, in my opinion,
> is the fact that (even young) German speakers usually do not
> encounter limitations in their vocabulary every day, and that
> therefore a poem made up out of non-sense words probably
> sounds much more unnatural to German than to English ears.
>
This comment puzzles me. It implies that speakers of English have more
vocabulary troubles that speakers of German. Why would this be? It's
well known that English has a larger vocabulary than any other language,
so the implication is that speakers of English don't know their own
language as well as speakers of German do.
Of course, what I've just said is an oversimplification. English has a
huge number of words, but most of these are not part of the everyday
vocabulary because they are too specialized. I don't know German, so I
have no idea whether the same condition holds in that language.
If it is true that nonsense words sound more unnatural to speakers of
German than to speakers of English, could it be because English is a fluid
language in which words are constantly being invented, whereas in German
old words are adapted for new objects or ideas? Again, I don't know German,
so this is just a speculation. Someone please enlighten me.
--
Jeff Lichtman at rtech (Relational Technology, Inc.)
"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent..."
{amdahl, sun}!rtech!jeff
{ucbvax, decvax}!mtxinu!rtech!jeff
thomas breuel
||is the fact that (even young) German speakers usually do not
||encounter limitations in their vocabulary every day, and that
||therefore a poem made up out of non-sense words probably
||sounds much more unnatural to German than to English ears.
|
|vocabulary troubles that speakers of German. Why would this be? It's
|well known that English has a larger vocabulary than any other language,
|so the implication is that speakers of English don't know their own
|language as well as speakers of German do.
|
|Of course, what I've just said is an oversimplification. English has a
|huge number of words, but most of these are not part of the everyday
|vocabulary because they are too specialized. I don't know German, so I
|have no idea whether the same condition holds in that language.
|
|If it is true that nonsense words sound more unnatural to speakers of
|German than to speakers of English, could it be because English is a fluid
|language in which words are constantly being invented, whereas in German
|old words are adapted for new objects or ideas? Again, I don't know German,
|so this is just a speculation. Someone please enlighten me.
There are two main reasons why I *think* that non-sense words sound less
natural to German than to English speakers (no offense intended).
It appears to me that in German a much larger fraction of the vocabulary
consists of compound words and therefore derives from known roots.
Secondly, the vocabulary of the literary German language is probably
significantly smaller than that of the literary English language, which
means that an educated German can become fluent in it easier than
an English speaker in his literary language.
Now, I can't state for a fact that my supposition is true. Perhaps you
could just take it as an example of what kind of bizarre phenomena *might*
limit the ability to translate literary works.
Thomas.
PS: needless to say that the GEB German translation of the Jabberwock
sounds extremely unnatural to me, both as poetry and as a translation.