Translation ethics?

Great Debates
1

For a creative writing class I teach, I’m thinking of an oddball assignment for my students (English majors, for the most part, and seniors, if that matters):

“Take a much-translated story, originally written in a language you don’t speak, or hardly speak, comparethe differences between the translation, and then produce your own, contemporary translation of same.”

The idea, not that it matters, is to demonstrate how much their own diction choices influence what they write (and how many writerly options and choices are still available, even in a story whose characters, plot, etc. have already been written.) Anyway, this is just a student exercise, so I know that it, in itself, is ethically fine.

But what if one of them comes up with a great translation? Very unlikely, I know, but if that happens, in your opinion, is it possible for someone to translate (in the purest sense of the word) from a language he doesn’t speak or read, and more to my great debate point, is it okay to publish such a translation?

It’s funny because I have translated stuff from French which (see the “embarrassing gaffes in a foriegn language” thread for examples) I don’t really speak fluently, at least not anymore, and have often relied on others’ translation for clues as to how to read some particularly difficult passages. This is not a point I tend to raise among my professional colleagues, however.

2

I don’t think you can call it a “translation” in that case.

Perhaps the most famous example of this is The Living Bible, which is billed as a “paraphrase” rather than a “translation” of the Bible and which (if I understand correctly) was done by someone who did not know Hebrew or Greek (the languages in which the Bible was originally written) and who based his work on an earlier English version(s) of the Bible.

3

Certainly such a tranlation would benefit from not being concerned about being “too faithful” to the original text’s structure and vocabulary (something I sometimes have problems with). I don’t want to flat-out say that it would never be okay to publish such a translation, but I think avoiding plagiarism would be very difficult.

4

being of greek origin and reading some of the translated material from greek to english and vice versa I find them extremely funny. It would take a lot more than knowledge of a language to translate its true meaning, things such as euphimisms, local sayings, cultural knowledge…and about a thousand other things.

5

I don’t see it as an ethical problem, generally. I don’t believe this kind of thing could be strictly and accurately termed a translation, though. To coin some new terminology and a new word, I might call it an interpretive interliteration.

This sounds like a fun and valuable excercise, though. I once tried to translate the first chapter (The Book of the Grotesque) of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio into German as a fun excercise, and although it was an abyssmal and horrible translation it taught me some invaluable knowledge not only linguistically, but personally and philosophically. Boundless language bound, so to speak.

If your students have no knowledge of the original language of the text they might miss some of the three dimensionality of this kind of a true translation, though. So ultimately it’s just a game of Telephone.

6

How about having them “contemporize” something like Canterbury Tales?

When I was a 2nd year HS French student, our teacher had us translate newspaper stories. Not particularly a great literary experience, but it beca,e clear quickly that the better translations were done by the people with superior writing skills, not simply the best vocabularies. We may not have had the strongest grasp of the language, but understood idiom, mood, tone, etc.