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As someone who only speaks English... I'm fascinated by the concept of language that is difficult to translate. Can anyone direct me to English-language literat

by ponker 6y ago

As someone who only speaks English... I'm fascinated by the concept of language that is difficult to translate. Can anyone direct me to English-language literature that is difficult to translate into other languages?

aflag 6y ago
Most books lose a bit of their magic when translated. However books full of neologisms and regional dialects are nearly impossible to translate without butching it. That's the case of Grande sertão veredas. You can tell the same story, but you'll probably miss the most important part of the book, which is the way it was written, the names of the characters, etc.
Jtsummers 6y ago
Look to literature that is "punny" or very culturally specific. An example: The title The Importance of Being Earnest is itself a pun on the character's (eventual) nature and name. Translating that to another language you'd need to change the name of the character to maintain the pun in the new language, which may not be feasible. That's a small example, but it's common in some books or plays to see things like this used frequently, especially in dialog.
- the_af 6y ago
  > The Importance of Being Earnest To add to this, in Spanish the title is translated so that it loses all sense of being a pun: "La importancia de llamarse Ernesto". "Ernesto" in Spanish has no correlation with "earnestness", it doesn't sound the same as the Spanish concept, and in general, the title doesn't sound like a pun. Spanish translators often add a footnote saying something like "this is an untranslatable play on words in the original English".
- wenc 6y ago
  Side point... one rare exception I can think of: The Asterix comic books in English maintained and even in some cases enhanced the humor of the original French. The puns were completely reinvented, and fit the context so well that one often forgets they were translations (well, on the other hand, I guess they weren't faithful translations so much as they were paraphrases).
thaumasiotes 6y ago
Poetry is language subject to some constraint, and it's generally impossible to translate it faithfully while also obeying the original constraint. If you look at Disney's song translations, they follow the rhythm faithfully, are pretty good about following the meaning, usually follow the choreography badly, and don't even try to preserve rhyme. (Even in languages in which poetry is supposed to rhyme.) From another perspective -- there is a lyric in the song Shiny, in Moana, going c'est la vie, mon ami. That's not actually English. How do you translate it from English? This line was translated into Russian as c'est la vie, mon ami. Russians can be expected to be familiar with French, at least at this level. Languages at a greater cultural distance -- including Vietnamese -- don't translate it at all. Intriguingly, the line was translated into French as c'est la vie, mon ami. This preserves the meaning perfectly -- it's more accessible to the French audience than it is to the American audience! -- but it completely loses whatever the implication was of saying the line in French as part of otherwise English dialogue. It's very difficult to translate anything that simultaneously expresses multiple things. You're doing well when you preserve a single aspect of the original.
zorked 6y ago
Finnegans Wake is probably the classical example. The latter books by William Gaddis also lose a lot (sometimes everything?) because they are so dependent on spoken American English. Cormac McCarthy is also sometimes hard to translate due to orality and some obscure language. Part of the problem with Grande Sertão: Veredas is that it is has a very inventive, very oral aesthetics that is based on a local dialect and a culture that is unknown (except very superficially) to most of its readers even in Brazil. The burden on a translator to transfer all of that to the foreign reader is immense.
teflodollar 6y ago
Any work that involves a lot of puns and dialect will be hard to translate, as will anything that uses a lot of rhetorical flair. Puns are often impossible because they involve a "collision" of meaning between two words. If this collision isn't possible in the translated language, the best thing the translator can do is try to come up with their pun. Dialect and slang also will be hard, because slang is kind of a capsule of the culture it comes from. So the translator is going to have to choose a more normal world, losing the original flavor, or pick some slang from the L2, thus bringing an "import" into the world of the work. Rhythm and prosody depend on the harmony between the sounds of the words in the original language. Of course, the words of the translation language will have an entirely different set of sounds, and perhaps the grammar won't even permit similar acts of parallelism. As a stupid example look at >Vini, Vidi, vici >I came, I saw, I conquered. Notice Latin doesn't require the pronoun I. But literally translating "Came,saw, conquered" sounds like it was written by a petulant 14 year old. Secondly, Caesar's clauses are a nice triplet of two syllables. The English version does pretty well there, until it reaches "conquered," which throws the rhythm off. I said it was a stupid example, because the English translates pretty well IMO, but hopefully I demonstrated the difficult work of the translator. Off the top of my head, I think these would be tough to translate. -Shakespeare. Too many puns, and the meter is tied to a rhythm natural to English. All poetry is difficult really. -Huckleberry Finn. Heavy dialect, which often involves the racial prejudices of the time. How can you translate that part? Nothing will be as disrespectful as the word is in English. Furthermore, how do you translate something like: >It must a been close on to one o’clock Do you preserve the grammar error? What's the difference between "close" and "close on"? -Faulkner. Same as Twain, plus some very heavy rhetoric. -Joyce. Same as Faulkner, but more puns, heavier rhetoric. If there's anything harder to translate than Finnegans Wake, let me know. -Gadsby. This book does not contain the letter E! E is the most common vowel in English, but it's not in many other languages. Is the translator "cheating" if constrains the same letter? Amazingly this problem has been tackled in the translation of a different book, La Disparation, a French novel also without any e's either. The English translation, A Void, avoids the character too. However, omitting the E would be too easy in Russian, so that version doesn't contain any O's.
ninly 6y ago
On this topic, Douglas Hofstadter's book Le ton beau de Marot is organized around this and related topics: poertry, translation, language and literary play, and the challenges and freedoms offered translators, all woven in typical Hofstadterian fashion with a breathtaking array of topics and observations. One of my favorite books, and it may interest anyone who, as you say, is fascinated by translation and its difficulties! Fair warning: the book gets a bit dark in parts (he wrote it after his wife's death, and covers that a bit), but not overwhelmingly or throughout. ETA: To address your original question, Hofstadter's book is organized around the challenge of translating "Ma mignonne", a very tight little French poem by Clément Marot (hence the book title), and goes into great detail about the challenges it presents, with lots of different approaches and translations. He talks about many other significant challenges to the translator -- the one that comes to mind is La disparition by Georges Perec[1] -- a novel famously written without appearance of the letter e. It was translated into English by Gilbert Adair as A Void -- also lacking that most common of glyphs. Other unpublished e-less translations exist, as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void
somewhereoutth 6y ago
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll has to be the definitive example I feel. Half of it is in a made up language but every English person instinctively knows what it means.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  https://j-entranslations.com/two-japanese-jabberwocky-poems/ https://j-entranslations.com/two-japanese-jabberwocky-poems/
lioeters 6y ago
> English-language literature that is difficult to translate into other languages? A few examples come to mind: Ulysses by James Joyce Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Naked Lunch by William Burroughs The stream-of-consciousness style of flowing sentences, how the author plays with language, exotic or made-up words, sounds, subconscious associations - all contribute to a very challenging translation, I imagine. --- Edit: Oh, I'm a couple days late in replying, and others have mentioned similar works of literature.

by ponker 6y ago

aflag 6y ago

Most books lose a bit of their magic when translated. However books full of neologisms and regional dialects are nearly impossible to translate without butching it. That's the case of Grande sertão veredas. You can tell the same story, but you'll probably miss the most important part of the book, which is the way it was written, the names of the characters, etc.

Jtsummers 6y ago

Look to literature that is "punny" or very culturally specific. An example: The title The Importance of Being Earnest is itself a pun on the character's (eventual) nature and name. Translating that to another language you'd need to change the name of the character to maintain the pun in the new language, which may not be feasible. That's a small example, but it's common in some books or plays to see things like this used frequently, especially in dialog.

the_af 6y ago
> The Importance of Being Earnest To add to this, in Spanish the title is translated so that it loses all sense of being a pun: "La importancia de llamarse Ernesto". "Ernesto" in Spanish has no correlation with "earnestness", it doesn't sound the same as the Spanish concept, and in general, the title doesn't sound like a pun. Spanish translators often add a footnote saying something like "this is an untranslatable play on words in the original English".
wenc 6y ago
Side point... one rare exception I can think of: The Asterix comic books in English maintained and even in some cases enhanced the humor of the original French. The puns were completely reinvented, and fit the context so well that one often forgets they were translations (well, on the other hand, I guess they weren't faithful translations so much as they were paraphrases).

thaumasiotes 6y ago

Poetry is language subject to some constraint, and it's generally impossible to translate it faithfully while also obeying the original constraint. If you look at Disney's song translations, they follow the rhythm faithfully, are pretty good about following the meaning, usually follow the choreography badly, and don't even try to preserve rhyme. (Even in languages in which poetry is supposed to rhyme.) From another perspective -- there is a lyric in the song Shiny, in Moana, going c'est la vie, mon ami. That's not actually English. How do you translate it from English? This line was translated into Russian as c'est la vie, mon ami. Russians can be expected to be familiar with French, at least at this level. Languages at a greater cultural distance -- including Vietnamese -- don't translate it at all. Intriguingly, the line was translated into French as c'est la vie, mon ami. This preserves the meaning perfectly -- it's more accessible to the French audience than it is to the American audience! -- but it completely loses whatever the implication was of saying the line in French as part of otherwise English dialogue. It's very difficult to translate anything that simultaneously expresses multiple things. You're doing well when you preserve a single aspect of the original.

zorked 6y ago

Finnegans Wake is probably the classical example. The latter books by William Gaddis also lose a lot (sometimes everything?) because they are so dependent on spoken American English. Cormac McCarthy is also sometimes hard to translate due to orality and some obscure language. Part of the problem with Grande Sertão: Veredas is that it is has a very inventive, very oral aesthetics that is based on a local dialect and a culture that is unknown (except very superficially) to most of its readers even in Brazil. The burden on a translator to transfer all of that to the foreign reader is immense.

teflodollar 6y ago

Any work that involves a lot of puns and dialect will be hard to translate, as will anything that uses a lot of rhetorical flair. Puns are often impossible because they involve a "collision" of meaning between two words. If this collision isn't possible in the translated language, the best thing the translator can do is try to come up with their pun. Dialect and slang also will be hard, because slang is kind of a capsule of the culture it comes from. So the translator is going to have to choose a more normal world, losing the original flavor, or pick some slang from the L2, thus bringing an "import" into the world of the work. Rhythm and prosody depend on the harmony between the sounds of the words in the original language. Of course, the words of the translation language will have an entirely different set of sounds, and perhaps the grammar won't even permit similar acts of parallelism. As a stupid example look at >Vini, Vidi, vici >I came, I saw, I conquered. Notice Latin doesn't require the pronoun I. But literally translating "Came,saw, conquered" sounds like it was written by a petulant 14 year old. Secondly, Caesar's clauses are a nice triplet of two syllables. The English version does pretty well there, until it reaches "conquered," which throws the rhythm off. I said it was a stupid example, because the English translates pretty well IMO, but hopefully I demonstrated the difficult work of the translator. Off the top of my head, I think these would be tough to translate. -Shakespeare. Too many puns, and the meter is tied to a rhythm natural to English. All poetry is difficult really. -Huckleberry Finn. Heavy dialect, which often involves the racial prejudices of the time. How can you translate that part? Nothing will be as disrespectful as the word is in English. Furthermore, how do you translate something like: >It must a been close on to one o’clock Do you preserve the grammar error? What's the difference between "close" and "close on"? -Faulkner. Same as Twain, plus some very heavy rhetoric. -Joyce. Same as Faulkner, but more puns, heavier rhetoric. If there's anything harder to translate than Finnegans Wake, let me know. -Gadsby. This book does not contain the letter E! E is the most common vowel in English, but it's not in many other languages. Is the translator "cheating" if constrains the same letter? Amazingly this problem has been tackled in the translation of a different book, La Disparation, a French novel also without any e's either. The English translation, A Void, avoids the character too. However, omitting the E would be too easy in Russian, so that version doesn't contain any O's.

ninly 6y ago

On this topic, Douglas Hofstadter's book Le ton beau de Marot is organized around this and related topics: poertry, translation, language and literary play, and the challenges and freedoms offered translators, all woven in typical Hofstadterian fashion with a breathtaking array of topics and observations. One of my favorite books, and it may interest anyone who, as you say, is fascinated by translation and its difficulties! Fair warning: the book gets a bit dark in parts (he wrote it after his wife's death, and covers that a bit), but not overwhelmingly or throughout. ETA: To address your original question, Hofstadter's book is organized around the challenge of translating "Ma mignonne", a very tight little French poem by Clément Marot (hence the book title), and goes into great detail about the challenges it presents, with lots of different approaches and translations. He talks about many other significant challenges to the translator -- the one that comes to mind is La disparition by Georges Perec[1] -- a novel famously written without appearance of the letter e. It was translated into English by Gilbert Adair as A Void -- also lacking that most common of glyphs. Other unpublished e-less translations exist, as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void

somewhereoutth 6y ago

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll has to be the definitive example I feel. Half of it is in a made up language but every English person instinctively knows what it means.

earthboundkid 6y ago
https://j-entranslations.com/two-japanese-jabberwocky-poems/ https://j-entranslations.com/two-japanese-jabberwocky-poems/

lioeters 6y ago

> English-language literature that is difficult to translate into other languages? A few examples come to mind: Ulysses by James Joyce Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Naked Lunch by William Burroughs The stream-of-consciousness style of flowing sentences, how the author plays with language, exotic or made-up words, sounds, subconscious associations - all contribute to a very challenging translation, I imagine. --- Edit: Oh, I'm a couple days late in replying, and others have mentioned similar works of literature.