{"id":68,"date":"2014-02-28T21:12:55","date_gmt":"2014-02-28T21:12:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/cwlt\/?p=68"},"modified":"2014-02-28T21:12:55","modified_gmt":"2014-02-28T21:12:55","slug":"working-with-translations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/cwlt\/2014\/02\/28\/working-with-translations\/","title":{"rendered":"Working with translations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pugetsound.edu\/academics\/academic-resources\/cwlt\/writing\/writing-advisor-schedule\/hannah-fattor\/\" target=\"_blank\">Hannah Fattor<\/a>, writing advisor<\/p>\n<p>I can\u2019t speak any other language besides English very well.\u00a0 I\u2019ve tried with Spanish, Gaelic, Greek, and Latin (to name a few) but I just don\u2019t have the mind for memorization, unfortunately.\u00a0 I\u2019ll never hold a conversation in French, but I do like to learn about different cultures, and one way I do this is by reading novels, poems, traditional stories, or plays that have been translated.\u00a0 I\u2019ve written quite a few papers on translated plays, and I find that there are some very important ways to think about translated texts that help me gain a deeper understanding of a foreign society and its culture.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Find an edition with footnotes, endnotes, any kind of notes.\u00a0 <\/strong>Mikhail Bulgakov\u2019s <i>Master and Margarita<\/i> makes ten times more sense when you can check in the back and find out why someone\u2019s name is funny, or what in the author\u2019s life prompted him to write about foreign currency so much.\u00a0 Aristophanes\u2019 plays are ten times more hilarious when you know why jokes were so dirty in the original Greek.\u00a0 Foreign works may allude to events that are unfamiliar to an outside audience, and learning about those events through literature often reveals why they were important to a culture.\u00a0 Finding a good translation that includes the translator\u2019s notes is incredibly helpful in understanding comedy in particular and linguistic nuance in general.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Learn about the culture!\u00a0<\/strong> Take the time to explore how a culture understands the themes that a novel or poem or play discusses.\u00a0 Learn a bit about writing styles and conventions.\u00a0 There are linguistic guides out there that discuss sentence structures and influences.\u00a0 If you\u2019re reading a landmark work in a society\u2019s literary history, find out what influences it had and watch out for those!\u00a0 The Persian epic, the Shahnameh, was incredibly influential to the literature of the Middle East, and it still defines a great deal of Iranian cultural identity.\u00a0 It is celebrated today in Iran, parts of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and other Persian-influenced regions.\u00a0 It could be helpful to find a list of major themes that still appear in modern writings from that society, or how modern audiences relate to the ancient text.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Look at the critical response.\u00a0<\/strong> Clearly, the work was popular enough to translate, but what did critics within its home culture think of it?\u00a0 Why do you think it was translated?\u00a0 An interesting option, if the work is fairly old, is to look up what scholars think of various translations, and why one is considered particularly good over another one.\u00a0 Translations can be tailored to serve a particular purpose, too; either they stick closely to the actual language they were written in, or they may incorporate more familiar sentence structures and language more idiomatic and connotative to the language they were translated into.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t understand an idiom or think that word choice is strange, try looking up translation notes or go looking for a glossary.<\/li>\n<li><strong>(<em>For poems, epics, and plays)<\/em> Research how it was originally presented.\u00a0<\/strong> Format is often incredibly important in poetry.\u00a0 Learning about the style in which a poem was written can lead to a deeper understanding of how the poem was intended to convey its message.\u00a0 Why would someone pick the haiku form over the tanka form in Japanese poetry?\u00a0 In some poetry, syllabic conventions were very important to the cadence.\u00a0 Ancient Greek epic poetry (like Homer\u2019s <i>The Odyssey<\/i>) and Old English works (like <i>Beowulf<\/i>) relied on particular rhythms.\u00a0 These same rhythms were important to Ancient Greek plays, and French dramas had strict rhyming patterns.\u00a0 On a completely different level, look up the style in which a play would have been performed.\u00a0 Japanese Noh theatre has a specific performance style that would be unusual for a Western audience to see, but it would be completely recognizable to a native audience.\u00a0 Look into what in particular would be expected.\u00a0 This can also show you where modern plays deviate from established norms.\u00a0 There have been various movements in British theatre\u2014a movement away from stylization to more natural acting styles, for example\u2014but the same holds true around the world.\u00a0 Indian dramas have changed through the centuries, still relying on some traditional elements but also utilizing new techniques.\u00a0 Think about spectacle when it comes to plays, and remember that there may be new conventions to discover about another culture.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Working with translations is hard work, particularly if, like me, you don\u2019t speak other languages.\u00a0 Even so, it\u2019s a great way to learn about a new culture, see a new perspective on the world, and understand how our own art could appear to an outside audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Hannah Fattor, writing advisor I can\u2019t speak any other language besides English very well.\u00a0 I\u2019ve tried with Spanish, Gaelic, Greek, and Latin (to name a few) but I just don\u2019t have the mind for memorization, unfortunately.\u00a0 I\u2019ll never hold &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/cwlt\/2014\/02\/28\/working-with-translations\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":394,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/cwlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/cwlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/cwlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/cwlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/394"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/cwlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/cwlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/cwlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/cwlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/cwlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/cwlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}