Translation Musings (provoked by Tabouli)

Sat Jan 26 07:04:53 UTC 2002

No: HPFGUIDX 34099

Tabouli wrote:

<<Ahaaaa!  Thanks Alexander, this reminds me of a musing I've long intended to raise on this list... those of you who've read HP in other languages, what are the translations like?  How good a job did they do?  How did they translate the humour?  (e.g. the Uranus joke wouldn't translate, I imagine). Were there many cross-cultural gaps, like the oft-quoted French confusion at the English embarrassment about love and sex in HP?  Any other concepts and scenes which don't quite come off taken out of the English-speaking context?

I've noted quite a lot of trans-Atlantic cultural differences surfacing in our analysis of the series (notably emotional expressiveness (US) vs emotional control (UK)), and surely there must be a lot more when comparing the Anglophone cultures with the non-Anglophone cultures.  Alexander?  Susanna?  Katze?>>

Yes, ma’am (still panting, but trying to sketch a military salute), here I am!!  And mind that it was you to ask my opinion, so I feel free to launch into another translation rant (close second to Snape rants on my list of favourites).

I’ve read the books, not all of them, but at least some, in Italian and German. To be exact, it was PS/SS and PoA in German and GoF in Italian. Funny thing is, the Italian version was much better than the German one, though I would have expected it to be the other way round. Why? Well, above all because German, even if its vocabulary is more limited than the English one (oh, yes, it is!), still has the same possibilities, structure-wise, of creating neologisms, a thing that I deem very important for translation. Examples: The suffix “-less” to indicate that something is deprived of something (colourless) has an exact correspondence in the German suffix “-los”, so if there’s an English adjective the translator particularly likes, he can always create a German neologism that is immediately understandable to the reader. Not a thing to do too often, but if it’s necessary to keep an important phrase “in tone”, it can be done. If used to often, it becomes a very tiresome mannerism. Next example: syntactic structure. Great big affinity between German and English, because both languages don’t have a tendency to suppress subordinates. Italian does. Last example: Compound nouns (is THAT the right term???) like “Quidditch pitch”. In German, compound nouns are made up in exactly the same way. In Italian, if you’re lucky, you have to resort to the preposition “of” which makes the whole construction a lot heavier, but in many cases, “of” doesn’t work at all because the Italian analogues “di” and “da” don’t cover all the possibilities and you have to make up a whole subordinate. 

I won’t bore you with more examples, after all I just wanted to explain why, basically, German HP could potentially be better than Italian HP.

The real problem arises with word play, names, poetry and specific objects or concepts that simply don’t have an analogue in the culture linked to the language you’re translating into. (And here I’m only speaking of German and Italian which are both languages spoken in a rather small part of the world and it’s still Europe. But even there the cultural difference can amount to a downright cultural gap- a German from Hamburg and an Austrian from Vienna may be only 2500 km apart, but boy what a cultural difference!)E.g. the Uranus joke you mentioned is impossible to translate: You either have to replace it by something that’s necessarily less subtle and far easier to catch, or you simply translate it 1:1, but then the reader won’t understand why Harry and Ron find it so funny. Come to think of it, Uranus is a particularly good example, for the joke in itself is extremely rude, but so well disguised. So, if a translator tries to find an equivalent that works, he’d have to fall back on something more obviously rude like: Trelawney: “Yes, my dear, that’s Venus in a very interesting position indeed: A sixty-nine degree conjunction with Jupiter. Very good work, Lavender!” Seamus: “Oh, yeah, Venus in a sixty-nine position, can I see that too, Lavender?” That would of course work, but it’s a little too obvious. Anyway, I’m going to look it up in the German version, but considering the poor quality of those I’ve read, I doubt that the translator caught it, let alone tried to find an appropriate substitute.

But these are minor difficulties compared to the whole problem with cultural context: take e.g. the whole concept of British boarding schools. Yes, we do have boarding schools in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, but even if you searched for a Head Girl or a Prefect with a magnifying glass, you won’t find one. The concept doesn’t exist, period. Same goes for Italy where sending your child to a boarding school nearly equals abandoning it on somebody’s doorstep. (OTOH, Mrs. Weasley should be one of the Italian readers’ favourite characters). Therefore, Head Boy isn’t something you can simply translate, you have to a) invent a convincing new word and b) explain it. Considering that HP has a target group ranging from age 6 to age 99, how do you explain? A glossary is always a tempting possibility, but out of question for children- they would get bored to death if they had to look up words they don’t understand. Which means that you have to find a subtle way of slipping the explanation into the text, maybe McGonagall’s welcome speech for the first years in PS/SS could serve as a vehicle.

Then there are the names: The assonance “Snape- snake” made the Italian translator name him “Pitone” (python) which, IMHO, is more unforgivable than the Imperius Curse. And McGonagall became McGranite. Eurgh! But that’s the difficulty with speaking names: translate them, and you necessarily have to interpret them, or leave them as they are, and the readers probably won’t get the meaning. 

No matter how well a translation is done, the translator will always create a different, but not necessarily worse, piece of literature. That’s something I completely agree about with Alexander (that’s a first!), but I’d love to hear his comments on Russian vs. English.

Susanna/pigwidgeon37

"And how come those portraits seem to be alive?"

"What'ya mean? All paintings move."

"No, they don't. We have lots of paintings in our villa, among them a real Chagall, and none of them..."

"And d'ya expect that something painted by a jackal will move? Now really..."

---------------------------------
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalised at My Yahoo!.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]