Fidelity vs. transparency

Fidelity vs. transparency

Fidelity (or faithfulness) and transparency, dual ideals in translation, are often at odds. A 17th-century French critic coined the phrase "les belles infidèles" to suggest that translations, like women, can be either faithful or beautiful, but not both.^[19]

Faithfulness is the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without distortion.

Transparency is the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to its grammar, syntax and idiom.

A translation that meets the first criterion is said to be "faithful"; a translation that meets the second, "idiomatic". The two qualities are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The criteria for judging the fidelity of a translation vary according to the subject, type and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social or historical context, etc.

The criteria for judging the transparency of a translation appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation "sounds wrong"; and, in the extreme case of word-for-word translationsgenerated by many machine-translation systems, often results in patent nonsense.

Friedrich Schleiermacher

Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may consciously seek to produce a literal translation. Translators of literary, religious or historic texts often adhere as closely as possible to the source text, stretching the limits of the target language to produce an unidiomatic text. A translator may adopt expressions from the source language in order to provide "local color".

In recent decades, prominent advocates of such "non-transparent" translation have included the French scholar Antoine Berman, who identified twelve deforming tendencies inherent in most prose translations,^[20] and the American theorist Lawrence Venuti, who has called upon translators to apply "foreignizing" translation strategies instead of domesticating ones.^[21]

Many non-transparent-translation theories draw on concepts from German Romanticism, the most obvious influence being the German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher. In his seminal lecture "On the Different Methods of Translation" (1813) he distinguished between translation methods that move "the writer toward [the reader]", i.e., transparency, and those that move the "reader toward [the author]", i.e., an extreme fidelity to the foreignness of thesource text. Schleiermacher favored the latter approach; he was motivated, however, not so much by a desire to embrace the foreign, as by a nationalist desire to oppose France's cultural domination and to promote German literature.

Current Western translation practice is dominated by the dual concepts of "fidelity" and "transparency". This has not always been the case, however; there have been periods, especially in pre-Classical Rome and in the 18th century, when many translators stepped beyond the bounds of translation proper into the realm of adaptation.

Adapted translation retains currency in some non-Western traditions. The Indian epic, the Ramayana, appears in many versions in the various Indian languages, and the stories are different in each. Similar examples are to be found in medieval Christian literature, which adjusted the text to local customs and mores.

Learning Resources

مراجع مهمة لدارسي الترجمة واللغة الانجليزية

Textbook and References

· Ghazala, H. (2002). Translation as Problems and Solutions: A Coursebook for University Students and Trainee Translators. Syria: Dar Al-Kalam Al-Arabi.

· Newmark, P. (1988). A Textbook of Translation. New York: Prentice-Hall.

· Shaheen, M. (). Theories of Translation and their Application to the Teaching of English/Arabic. Jordan: Dar Al-Thaqafa Library.

· عبدالرحمن، وجيه. (2000). وقفة مع بعض الترجمات الإنكليزية لمعاني القرآن الكريم. المملكة العربية السعودية: مجمع الملك فهد.

· عناني, محمد. (1992). فن الترجمة. الشركة المصرية العالمية للنشر.

· عوض, إبراهيم. (1984). فن الترجمة من الانكليزية إلى العربية. بيروت: دار الراتب الجامعية.

· نجيب، عزالدين. أسس الترجمة. القاهرة: مكتبة ابن سينا للنشر والتوزيع

· خلوصي, صفاء. (2000). فن الترجمة. الهيئة المصرية العامة للكتاب.

· Mono-lingual and Bilingual Dictionaries.

ترجمة سونت شكسبير
No Longer Mourn For Me When I Am Dead

لا تحزن طويلاً بعد موتي - السوناتا رقم 71

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لا تحزن طويلاً بعد موتي
لا تحزن وراء سماعك الأجراس الحزينة
تعلن إفتراقيا والوجودا
تعلن إرتحاليا من الدنيا البغيضة
إلى قماءة ودودا:
وحين تقرأني ، لا تذكر ، يد كاتب القصيدة،
فمن فرط حبي لك ، أحب أن أغيب عن أفكارك السعيدة
لئلا يؤجج ، ذكري ، أحزانك المجيدة.
آه ! بل أنني ألح عليك برجائيا الشديدا
بعد أن يستوي جسدي في الطين ، هميدا
أن لا تجعل لإسمي البئيس ، على شفاهك ترديدا ؛
بل دع حبك يمضي مع حياتي ، بعيدا ؛
لكي لا ينظر هذا العالم ،
في فجيعتك ، بعقلنته الشديدة ،
فيسخر من جموحك بعد موتي
ويهزأ من أنينك، ويسفه التنهيدا.

.
23/8/2011




Quote: Shakespeare Sonnet 71: No Longer Mourn For Me When I Am Dead No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell: Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it, for I love you so, That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then should make you woe. O! if, I say, you look upon this verse, When I perhaps compounded am with clay, Do not so much as my poor name rehearse; But let your love even with my life decay; Lest the wise world should look into your moan, And mock you with me after I am gone.

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSLATING POETRY

ALBANIAN DIRT:
THE PROBLEM OF
TRANSLATING POETRY

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The difficulty of translating poetry is twofold: the words and meaning on the one hand, the flow and rhythm (or rhyme) on the other. Most translations of poetry are bad. This is mainly because the translator knows the foreign language too well and his or her language too poorly. In Albanian poetry, a good example of a classically-bad translator is Dr Robert Elsie, a Canadian albanologist of high distinction and erudition, but someone whose grasp of English is limited to the writing of academic papers and dissertations. His translations read as if they were written by a student - or an Albanian - and, in their awkward, unconvincing, almost robotic English, do a disservice to the originals.

In fact, after reading his (non-bilingual) anthology AN ELUSIVE EAGLE SOARS some years ago, I concluded that, unlike Macedonia, Albania had surprisingly poor poets - and started to write Albanian poems myself! It was then I realised that however good an original might be, it can be completely swamped or undermined by poor translation.

Dr Elsie is not a poet - but that is irrelevant: some famous poets are extremely bad translators, the most obvious case being Robert "Iron John" Bly whose translations of Rilke are embarrassing. "Famous Séamus"Heaney and his fellow-Ulsterman Paul Muldoon are not much better. On the other hand, another Ulsterman, Ciaran Carson, is a superb translator - one of the very best, as can be seen in his rollicking and faithful translation from the Irish of the 18th century satire 'The Midnight Court'.

Good translators do not even need to speak either language natively: an excellent example is Ewald Osers, a Czech who has made good translations of (Slavonic) Contemporary Macedonian Poetry (Forest Books), and of his fellow-countryman Miroslav Holub, into English. Admittedly, though, Holub (like Popa) translates gratefully.

Another outstanding modern translator is Herbert Lomas (Bloodaxe Books) who has translated Contemporary Finnish Poetry. Neither of these books is in a bilingual edition - so it is impossible for me to say if the original is much better. But one which is - THE ERROR OF BEING by the outstanding Romanian poet Ion Caraion - can be seen to be poorly translated by Marguerite Dorian & Elliott B. Urdang without any knowledge of Romanian other than through other Romance languages and Latin. (See my own translation from this collection.)

A GOOD TRANSLATION IS ONE THAT HAS AN EXISTENCE INDEPENDENT OF THE ORIGINAL.

The most famously good translator is Edward FitzGerald, whose universally-known rendering of The Ruba'iyát of Omar Khayyám reads as if it were originally composed in English. In fact he re-wrote and re-ordered a selection of Khayyám's verses, and sacrificed the original (rather obscure) meaning to fluency, thus creating not just a new poem in its own right, but an uniquely visionary poem of genius.

Even more extreme a translation is Yeats' early poem When you are old and grey and full of sleep..."translated" (or rather very freely paraphrased) from the incomparable Pierre de Ronsard's sonnet Quand vous serez vien vieille... of which only one line is actually translated from Ronsard's original. (Click to see Ronsard's original, my own translation, and Yeats' paraphrase all together.)

The contemporary and egregious Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku has a whole posse of translators and her American editor Henry Israeli. But there are many examples of awkwardnesses and poor English in their translations; I think I have made a slightly better job of translating her splendid poem Provim.

Many Albanian poems sent to me by my co-translator Zana Banci simply will not go into English. What sounds fresh in Albanian sounds banal in English, and there is no way to be faithful to the spirit of the original without traducing it at the same time: traduttore, traditore, as the famous Italian dictum has it.

Albanian, like Serbian, is not a laconic language. English now is. When one is encounters zappy, laconic poetry in Albanian or Serbian, it is very difficult to render it in English - especially if there is word-play. On the other hand, it is equally difficult to translate more wordy Albanian poems without reducing them considerably.

An example is a marvellous poem by Mitrush Kuteli, whose real name was Dhimitër Pasko, born in Pogradec, south-eastern Albania, in 1907, translated Gogol's Dead Souls into Albanian - and so was himself no stranger to the problems of translation. He was (like everyone of talent) sent to a labour-camp by Enver Hoxha, but escaped execution, because good translators were needed by the régime.