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The Humanities Library's avatar

If we needed it, more evidence that the role of translator is so underappreciated! When I'm reading a novel in translation, I tend to give all credit to the novelist and rarely look up the name of the translator, as though they were just laboriously and uncreatively substituting words. Your detailed insight into the process is enough to snap anyone out of that lazy thinking. I never imagined, for example, that the translator of the first line of the Odyssey would have to worry about allusions to Shaft 😂

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Rosemary's avatar

I think people struggle with the realization that translation isn’t a simple 1:1 decoding exercise, especially if it’s their first encounter with a translated work. Or they maybe think that it COULD be a 1:1 decoding exercise if only the translated were rigorously honest enough.

This has been a bit of a struggle with my 10 year old — we not infrequently encounter different translations of things (the Iliad, the Bible, etc) and he really wants one translation to be “correct” compared to the others, which are perhaps creative retellings but not “the original.” (I think the people who simply insist that the KJV or Douay-Rheims translations of the Bible are the “correct” ones are sort of thinking like this.)

It took several days of intermittently returning to the conversation, but I eventually convinced him by walking him through a few sentences in a French novel. By the time we got to me pulling Houllebecq off the shelf (wouldn’t be my choice for a child it was just on hand lol) I was more than a little exasperated that he *just wouldn’t believe me* — but tbh upon further reflection I remembered thinking that way myself when I was about his age. I wonder if I too would still sort of unconsciously assume that language worked like that if I’d never really tried to learn another language. And I wonder if that’s where some of the more obtuse criticism comes from.

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