| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5 6] > | On translators and translation Thread poster: Aurora Humarán (X)
|
|---|
Aurora Humarán (X) 
Argentina
Local time: 09:26
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Do we really know how we translate or what we translate? Are we to accept ‘naked ideas’ as the means of crossing from one language to another? ... Translators know they cross over but do not know by what sort of bridge. They often re-cross by a different bridge to check up again. Sometimes they fall over the parapet into limbo.
Firth
| | | | Aurora Humarán (X)
Argentina
Local time: 09:26
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Translation quality assessment proceeds according to the lordly, completely unexplained, whimsy of ‘It doesn’t sound right.
Peter Fawcett
| | | | Aurora Humarán (X)
Argentina
Local time: 09:26
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | On words and worlds | Jan 6, 2006 |
Is it not strange that a literal translation is almost always a bad one? And yet everything can be translated well.
From this, one can see what it really means to understand a language entirely; it means to wholly understand the people that speak it.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
| | | | Aurora Humarán (X)
Argentina
Local time: 09:26
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
The translator must be a great editor, a psychologist, a judge of human taste; if not, his translation will be a nightmare. But why should a man with such rare qualities become a translator? Why shouldn't he be a writer himself, or be engaged in a business where diligent work and high intelligence are well paid? A good translator must be both a sage and a... See more
The translator must be a great editor, a psychologist, a judge of human taste; if not, his translation will be a nightmare. But why should a man with such rare qualities become a translator? Why shouldn't he be a writer himself, or be engaged in a business where diligent work and high intelligence are well paid? A good translator must be both a sage and a fool. And where do you get such strange combinations?
Isaac Bashevis Singer ▲ Collapse
| | |
|
|
|
Aurora Humarán (X)
Argentina
Local time: 09:26
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | On translation | Jan 11, 2006 |
Translation is change and motion; literature dies when it stays the same, when it has no place to go.
Eliot Weinberger
| | | | Aurora Humarán (X)
Argentina
Local time: 09:26
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | On translators... | Feb 12, 2006 |
“I believe that a translator is a recreator of literature, not a transcriber. The most compelling part of translation occurs when I am furthest from the original text and am confronting the problem of writing my own ‘original text’ — one that duplicates the tone and the meaning of the first author’s work and t... See more
“I believe that a translator is a recreator of literature, not a transcriber. The most compelling part of translation occurs when I am furthest from the original text and am confronting the problem of writing my own ‘original text’ — one that duplicates the tone and the meaning of the first author’s work and that, hopefully, reads as if it had been written in English. A ghostly process, perhaps, but one that requires the same effort as writing my own essays and poems — the same concentration of whatever perception, understanding, and feeling I can bring to the typewriter.... I consider translation as an honorable and necessary activity.”
Edith Grossman (translator of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez) ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Thanks for sharing this | Feb 12, 2006 |
Aurora, thanks for sharing this. An interesting perspective from highly respected translator (who also did the acclaimed recent translation of Don Quijote). Interestingly, I heard another translator, Barbara Goldberg, make a very similar comment in a lecture the other day. She too stressed the importance of getting away from the literal, getting distance from the original.
Aurora Humarán wrote: “I believe that a translator is a recreator of literature, not a transcriber. The most compelling part of translation occurs when I am furthest from the original text and am confronting the problem of writing my own ‘original text’ — one that duplicates the tone and the meaning of the first author’s work and that, hopefully, reads as if it had been written in English. A ghostly process, perhaps, but one that requires the same effort as writing my own essays and poems — the same concentration of whatever perception, understanding, and feeling I can bring to the typewriter.... I consider translation as an honorable and necessary activity.” Edith Grossman (translator of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez)
| | | | Aurora Humarán (X)
Argentina
Local time: 09:26
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | On differences | Feb 26, 2006 |
Translators live off the differences between languages, all the while working toward eliminating them.
Edmond Cary
| | |
|
|
|
Aurora Humarán (X)
Argentina
Local time: 09:26
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
"A translator is the mail horse of enlightenment."
Alexander Pushkin
[Edited at 2006-03-16 21:51]
| | | | Aurora Humarán (X)
Argentina
Local time: 09:26
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
“The ‘tower of Babel’ does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics. What the multiplicity... See more
“The ‘tower of Babel’ does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics. What the multiplicity of idioms actually limits is not only a ‘true’ translation, a transparent and adequate interexpression, it is also a structural order, a coherence of construct.”
Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” 1985 ▲ Collapse
| | | | Aurora Humarán (X)
Argentina
Local time: 09:26
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | on translation | Mar 20, 2006 |
“Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work ... See more
“Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one.”
(Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 1955) ▲ Collapse
| | | |
A translator is a professional schizophrenic, continuously wandering on the edge, risking his sanity in the crashing zone of two languages and two cultures. He is operating in an elevated state of mind, as if in tranceindeed, it is a creative trance, a state of bipolarity, of being at two places simultaneously, moving parallel in two worlds. In this sense, he is an exotic stranger, an itinerant of the ever-growing literary world. Invisibly, condemned to solitude, he enters this atypical state of awareness, becomes a trance-later.
Zoltán Pék
I love this one! It's how I feel each and every day, but it's a feeling I wouldn't trade for anything in the world!
Thanks, Au, for such a wonderful topic I'm thinking of putting some of these in a poster or something to hang on one of the walls of my studio...
| | |
|
|
|
Aurora Humarán (X)
Argentina
Local time: 09:26
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
So how do we get good translations? It really requires only two elements: command of the language and suppression of the ego. As a translator, I must grasp the play in the source language and render it in natural, playable, understandable fashion in the target language. I must check my ego at the door of the studio and avoid placing myself above the author. Does the author offer a poetic image? I must find a way to render that very image, or as close an equivalent as I can find. Does the author ... See more So how do we get good translations? It really requires only two elements: command of the language and suppression of the ego. As a translator, I must grasp the play in the source language and render it in natural, playable, understandable fashion in the target language. I must check my ego at the door of the studio and avoid placing myself above the author. Does the author offer a poetic image? I must find a way to render that very image, or as close an equivalent as I can find. Does the author crack a joke? I must find a way to render the author’s joke, not cop out by substituting my own. Does it seem to me there is a weakness in the author’s play? Suck it up and translate it, buddy; this is not your play. Ask yourself this: the play has been around for what — a hundred, two hundred years? Two hundred years from now, whose text will still be around? Yours or the playwright's?
Robert Bethune ▲ Collapse
| | | | Aurora Humarán (X)
Argentina
Local time: 09:26
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
It may not overstate the case to claim that the history of the world could be told through the history of translation. Indeed, one might even assert that, without translation, there is no history of the world.
L.G.Kelly
| | | | Aurora Humarán (X)
Argentina
Local time: 09:26
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | "The first law of translation | May 20, 2006 |
is clear: nothing can be taken as final."
Henry Gifford
| | | | | Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5 6] > | To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator: You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request » On translators and translation | CafeTran Espresso | You've never met a CAT tool this clever!
Translate faster & easier, using a sophisticated CAT tool built by a translator / developer.
Accept jobs from clients who use Trados, MemoQ, Wordfast & major CAT tools.
Download and start using CafeTran Espresso -- for free
Buy now! » |
| | Anycount & Translation Office 3000 | Translation Office 3000
Translation Office 3000 is an advanced accounting tool for freelance translators and small agencies. TO3000 easily and seamlessly integrates with the business life of professional freelance translators.
More info » |
|
| | | | X Sign in to your ProZ.com account... | | | | | |
Login to reply/comment 
Translation news
