LL-L "Language use" 2009.07.07 (01) [EN]

[Lowlands-L List]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 07 July 2009 - Volume 01
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From: Jacqueline Bungenberg de Jong <Dutchmatters at comcast.net>
Subject: LL-L "Language use" 2009.07.06 (03) [EN]

Beste Luc, I have two languages. I was born in the Netherlands and arrived
in the United States early enough to now feel thoroughly at home with
American English. But still, my soul is Dutch. (It is like your blood group,
it never changes except by bone marrow transplantation)

When I am in the Netherlands it would not occur to me to grab an English
translation of a Swedish book, if a Dutch translation by a good translator
is available. And thank heaven that there are  a few good ones in the
Netherlands. Come to think of it, the only foreign language books that I
read  on purpose translated into a language other than Dutch, were English
translations of Kant and Hegel when I had to take Philosophy at the
University of Utrecht .

The art of translation from one set of language, time and culture into
another set is hellishly difficult, therefore I would prefer to not have to
change hats more than once while reading a book. If no Dutch translation is
available I will take English: No sweat!

A good translator is a performing artist, an alchemist and a magician. He,-
or she as the case may be -, has to digest the written word and transmogrify
its sense and reason to energy, intelligence, weight, feeling, color, music,
rhythm and whatever else it takes, so that it dances out of the hat at the
other end as something that gives us the same experience when reading it in
its original language. No wonder that there are so *few* good ones. And even
two good ones do not necessarily read the same book. Just try and read the
Hungarian Author Sándor Marái’s book , which appeared in English under the
title “Embers” with an excellent translation by Carol Brown Janeway and in
Dutch as “Gloed” with a translation of Mary Alföldy. It is the same story
told by Janeway by the glow of the fire and by its ashes by Alföldy. An
example of an awful translation is the English translation of “Minoes” by
Annie M.G. Schmidt. This guy managed to destroy everything that made that
book a magic experience for me and my children.

But what goes for literature does not necessarily hold for other written
materials. The question then becomes, where do you hold the line? Text
books? On what? An English translation of an original Chinese text on
acupuncture? In practice they are using English textbooks at the
Universities and even there it is not limited to the sciences  and
i-technology. And what about German, Spanish and French? Does it come down
to us having to start to think of our minority language as some artifact of
culture that we insist on maintaining against the threat of English as a
lingua franca. Look at us in Lowlands! Isn’t that what we are all about?

I’d rather pay a good translator.

I would very much like to read the 58 comments but I cannot get the “tiny
URL” to work. Could you send it again Thank you!

Met Hartelijke Groeten.

Jacqueline BdJ

Seattle USA
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From: Henno Brandsma <hennobrandsma at hetnet.nl>
 Subject: LL-L "Language use" 2009.07.06 (03) [EN]

From: Hellinckx Luc <luc.hellinckx at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language politics"

Beste Lowlanders,

Just read this article in the NY Times, written by Daniel Hamermesh, a
labour economist from the University of Texas.

Title: How the Market Influences What Language You Read In. Quite disturbing
really, but realistic nonetheless...here goes:

My Dutch friends tell me that they read foreign (non-Dutch) novels that are
translated into English rather than into Dutch.
Their English is very good, but their Dutch is clearly better. So, I ask,
why read in English?
Their answer is simple: take a book originally in Swedish, like Stieg
Larsson’s wonderful Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. If somebody translates it
into Dutch, the relatively small number of Dutch-speakers means that the
market for the translation will be much smaller — and the royalties and
profits smaller too — than the market for an English translation.
These smaller returns attract translators who are not as good as those
attracted into translating a book into English; the supply curve of
translators is upward-sloping.
My friends say they would rather read a good translation into a language
they know well, but not perfectly, than a mediocre translation into their
native language.

The author is of Jewish descent and holds teaching positions in both
Rotterdam and Maastricht; I guess he knows fairly well what he's talking
about. Don't want to take a position in this polemic, but fact is that the
58 comments he received so far were all well worth reading.

http://tinyurl.com/moq2so

Question: If Dutch is your native language, would you rather read a mediocre
translation in Dutch than a good one in English?

Detail: Stieg Larsson's book "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is titled
"Mannen die vrouwen haten" in Dutch, "Men who hate women", and something
similar in Swedish. The English (or American?) publisher was apparently
taken aback by the original title.

Kind greetings,

 Luc Hellinckx, Halle


- It depends: really literary books (e.g. classics) from big publishers do
get good translations (e.g. Ulysses has a fantastic translation, so has Don
Quixote, War and Peace, etc.) as a rule, and such tranlations are subsidized
by several funds as well, to compensate for wordly rate (the usual way of
paying for a translation is by word/page plus a small precentage of the
royalties) of translations [and royalties are less as well, of course]. This
is a niche market, for relatively expensive books. many children's books
also have good translations, e.g. Harry Potter has a relatively good one,
although I have read only small parts of it, as I prefer the original....

- More "pulpy" books (most thrillers, romantic novels, "real life"-stories,
etc) have a hurried translation (bestsellers have to brought out quickly),
and these books have smaller profit margins. The quality of those is often
quite bad, the original "shimmers through", and e.g. if there are maths
terms (e.g.) or other science terms, there are many errors, even. Quite a
difference. But then, the audience is different and less likely to be taken
aback by that: they want "an easy read", and don't really seem to care too
much about the trnslation quality. Someone who wants to read Tolstoy has
higher expectations than that....

My 2 cts,

Henno Brandsma

•

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