I've been thinking about the layers in translation that Christopher Maurer's mentioned in his lecture last Friday. How all translations convey different layers: the authors and works that the author absorbed before writing the source text, the editors that edited that text, the text's translation, and the translator, who at the same time absorbed many other texts themselves. I would also add the layers of culture, of history, of gender, or race, background, nationality, etc. It's impossible, at least, in my opinion to know, and even more difficult, to be aware of all these layers. But I believe it's the translator's job to discover as many layers as possible and take them into account when translating a text. And, so, a big translator task is to investigate. Investigate about everything, read as much as possible on the source text, on its author, on its historical and cultural context...and that is something that David Hawkes presents to the reader in his introduction of Cao Xueqin's The Story of The Sone. And it's been something that I've had to learn when translating my capstone. I've come to realize that translation is 80% research, 20% translation. I think this is something we don't learn a lot when learning about the theory or practice of translation, and it's something that we should bring out more in conversations with our peers.
I find David Hawkes decision to "translate everything, even puns" very interesting. I think that it's a very tough decision to make, but I feel like his choice was made having a scholarly audience in mind rather than a more literary niche. I believe his goal was to make the reader understand the content rather than appreciate the form. I wish I could prove this hypothesis by accessing the source text. I wonder if my classmates agree with this.
No comments:
Post a Comment