What is literary translation?

Have you ever attempted to translate a document from one language to another? If so, you are probably aware that online translation tools often prove to be inadequate substitutes for a professional translation. For full-length articles or long-form literary works, these online cut-and-paste tools fall even further from the mark. 

Why is Translation Difficult?

“But can’t an adequate replacement for a word be found in ____ language?”, people often ask me. Frustrations arise because individual words can be found, actually, and online translation tools do accomplish this simple feat. But unless it’s a word list that is being translated, words are communicated in context with the words around them (sentences, phrases, paragraphs, etc.), and are made up of distinct nuances, norms, and, in the case of foreign languages, etymological divergences (the origins of words and the ways in which their meanings have changed differently in different languages throughout history).

These aspects of language translation have implications that are compounded if a translating author takes generational and/or geographic differences into account or has drawn from more than one discipline, as is often the case in the social sciences.

In other words, language is culturally embedded. And cultures, as with the humans who possess it, change and adapt over time.

Culture History

Without getting into too much detail, when it comes to literary translations, this cultural embeddedness of language is most often understood as national in origin and national in destination. I say this because a nation’s authorized heritage discourse (the range of assumptions about the nature and meaning of heritage*) impacts a public’s conception of themselves in relation to their society. 

Heritage**, aka the collective imaginings of “who we are as a nation,” influence our historiographies (the writing of history) and the way we conceive of our and others’ individual selves (i.e., culturally constructed categories like ethnicity, race, sexuality, and gender). Our nationalistic predilection has even influenced our copyright conventions, which are enforced and reinforced by national and inter-national law. 

As an exercise, ask yourself, what is a quintessential American accent? If you’ve traveled overseas for any amount of time, you may realize that the answer to the question depends on who’s asking. Is it from New England or the Deep South? Midwestern or Southern Californian? Which part of town, moreover? 

Maybe the question is more complicated than it would be in most cases because of the tremendous diversity found in the U.S. So try to think past each region’s accent for a moment to focus instead on their different syntax (the arrangement of words and phrases), lexicon (vocabulary), and speaking style. Extrapolate this and you begin to get an idea of the challenge translators face making insights, experiences, and perceptions in one language accessible to speakers of another.

On Literary Translation

Within the world of books and literature, the practice and art of translation is essentially one of fidelity to the original text with consideration for the intended audience, especially in terms of style, flow, time (past and present), and place (there and here). Therefore, a word-for-word literal translation, which is what online tools most often provide, may sound unnatural in the target language or fail at conveying the original meaning.

For example, the word ‘excite’ in English has a sexual undertone. In Spanish, ‘excitar’ has a sexual overtone. The word ‘excited’ in English translates into either ‘emocionado’ or ‘alborotado,’ which mean ‘emotional’ or ‘rowdy,’ respectively, when translated back into English. To convey the meaning of ‘excited,’ therefore, as in “excited to attend a fair,” from the English to the Spanish, requires recourse of a completely different word, ‘entusiasmado,’ which is a more faithful rendering of the tone of the original even if it resembles ‘enthusiastic’ in English. And that’s just between two Western languages. 

Mark Davie, professor of Italian at the Universities of Liverpool and Exeter, has said the following on translation:

by definition, [translation] involves finding ways to express alien concepts from an alien culture, the process is necessarily imperfect, involving a succession of compromises in the search for an equivalent in the target language… A perfect translation is no more attainable than perpetual motion. So the translator’s task is not to attempt the impossible but rather to manage the losses in translation and find compensating gains.

Translating one’s work into a foreign language also quickly identifies extraneous, unnecessary, or ambiguous language in the source language. In translating from the English to the Spanish, for example, I often note that the English language is generally more ambiguous than Spanish, which usually persuades me to revise my original English writing. This is not to say that the Spanish language is somehow impervious to ambiguity. Simply that iterational clarity is more closely monitored and sought by Spanish speakers and readers. Alternatively, Spanish is much more evocative, poetic, or “flowery” in its expression than English, as many have surely recognized. 

Spreading Cultural Awareness Understanding

As part of our mission statement here at Westwood Press, we seek to promote a shared sustainable future. As bilingual anthropologists, one way we pursue this lofty goal is by disseminating cultural understanding through translation. Since to translate language is to translate culture, translation makes “other” people able to be understood and opens up new insights into our own way of writing, thinking, and being.

We don’t know what we don’t know, right? Why not take a chance on a book from some distant place and open yourself up to learning about a completely different world and perspective? 

My belief is that the goal of translation is to render a work comprehensible at the minimum and to provide a culturally, temporally, and situationally contextualized understanding at best. And that means that the words aren’t going to be exactly the same.

If you’re considering translating your work, feel free to drop me a line to discuss next steps.

Written by: Edward Zegarra 

* Smith, L. 2004. Archaeological theory and the politics of cultural heritage. New York: Routledge.

**Heritage is not static. It is practiced and negotiated.

For more information, check out Tomedes’ blog on translation.