Huda post talk notes and readings on translating from/into dialects - Lianbi

 Notes about this week’s readings:

The first article I read was Rachel Lung’s “Non-standard language in translation,” I have some serious issues with this article. Unfortunately although there are many people working on Chinese-English translation studies in Hong Kong, I usually don’t find the articles insightful. Many assumptions are made without justification or even acknowledgement and translation is approached as a technical linguistic exercise, not as a subject of interest for literary studies…

I appreciate that the article is very specific and hands-on. It is true that we cannot achieve formal equivalence when translating dialects in English into Chinese. Some grammatical features are just not there. Even if they were there, it wouldn’t make sense to translate the dialect “formally.” (Yet, isn’t this so frequently the case in Chinese-English translations? It sounds like far too obvious a point to me…)

I find two out of the three examples the article gives of good translations of English dialects in English quite ridiculous. Use near-homonyms?? Render “lizards” as “western doctors”??? Seriously?? That’s how we’re supposed to render the slightly idiosyncratic “them lizards” in the English into Chinese?? I cannot believe it.

I think this ridiculousness is rooted in a deeper problem: the author’s prejudice against ways of speaking and the author’s own belief in prescriptive linguistics. She correctly points out that “standard vs. non-standard English” is not a question of “formal vs. informal,” but what she implies throughout the article is that “standard vs. non-standard” is in fact “correct vs. incorrect” and worse, “educated vs. uneducated.” “The fact that the speaker also has problems with concord is indicative of her social and educational background.” No, the use of AAVE does not imply that the speaker is not capable of language and expressing themselves clearly, nor that they are uneducated. The lizard homonym example and the second example where the translator again “play with homonyms'” are seriously problematic. The neutral topolectic difference in the original is translated into a deficient way of speaking in Chinese. The other example where the strategy is to use a character common for the Canton dialect is okay. 

The second article I read was Jaime Harker’s “Contemporary Japanese Fiction & ‘Middlebrow’ Translation Strategies.”

I really enjoyed the beginning. Harker summarized very well the problems I’ve been having with the foreignization vs. domestication dichotomy. I love the idea of “monolithic certainty” which is one weakness of Venuti’s theory. I find the reformulation of “foreignization as “alienating experimentalism” insightful, and its attractiveness to post-structuralists and modernists sense-making: it is “not only aesthetically but also politically and ethically superior.” I also find it very interesting that Harker describes Venuti as “elitist” (31) just because of his own fluent prose. What does Harker really mean there?? Is it that Venuti likes foreignization symbolically and theoretically but cannot really stand it in practice?

I also like the formulation that “Highbrow disdain for the middlebrow… is also a gendered aversion”: women are the source of “suffocating convention”… And I understand how Kitchen goes against all these stereotypes. Harker really presents a compelling argument for the not so conventional approach of translating a novel into “bubblegum” Japanese, which I feel would be similar to Gen Z English? I wonder to what extent this bubblegum Japanese can be enjoyable for older generations. Is it really a class thing or a time thing? Anna, have you read this translation? What do you feel about the style? I love the writing style of this article and its ideas come through very clearly, but I would love to talk more about whether the actual translation is like what he describes.

Huda Fakhreddine Post-talk notes:

I thoroughly enjoyed Huda’s presentation and find her a very inspiring figure. I am happy to have finally met a female professional translator, also a translator translating from, not into, her first language. I really saw her as a role model and found her ways of thinking, her choice of translation projects, and the way she challenges assumptions in the academic field inspiring and fascinating. I don’t know what else to say! I will probably remember her conception of modernism in Arabic poetry and poetry translation for a long time.