I found Ted Goossen to be a fun and engaging speaker. He and Ken Liu have both commented on the history of colonialism in their respective languages, but it was interesting to see how the two diverged. For instance, I wasn't aware that the meaning of ai was changed by contact with Christianity into something more resembling the Western concept of love. To see how this impacted his upcoming translation was very eye-opening.
A Simple Soul makes repeated references to thee and thou, and how the character use the pronoun politely and impolitely in their interactions with one another. I assume that the English reader at the time would have understood the kind of informality which thou implies, and might also have known that thou is a cognate of tu, i.e. contrasted against you / vous. I don't think either of these assumptions hold up today. We are farther removed in time from the point when thou was a part of natural English speech, and French is not as widely considered a marker of culture today. The modern translator of A Simple Soul would need to find a solution to this problem. Conversely, translators into French need to choose between tu/vous when writing dialog translated from modern English.
Another instance of antiquated language I noticed was the repeated reference to "savages" and "negroes". These are no longer the accepted terms to refer to indigenous and Black people. Would a modern translator have to keep them in this text in order to avoid anachronism, or is anachronism warranted in this case? I don't know the French words in question.
Both book reviews made me want to buy the works reviewed. I was waiting for the reviewer to consider the role of the translator, but neither review did so. I found this also in looking up reviews of A Memory Called Empire / Im Herzen Des Imperiums; none of the reviews mentioned the translator's choices.
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