Some factors determining the quality of a translation
The quality and nature of a translation (let’s say from the French) depends on at least three things: the translator’s knowledge of French language, history, and culture; his or her conception of the task of the translator; and his or her ability to write well in English. These three variables have subsets that can recombine infinitely, which is why one work can have such widely differing translations. Publishers selecting a translator seem to proceed on the assumption that the most important qualification is the first. “Let’s ask Professor X, head of the French department at Y!” Often they completely ignore the second factor—how will Professor X approach the task of translating?—and certainly the third—what is Professor X’s writing style like? All three factors are vital, but in many instances, if one has to rank them, the third—how well the translator writes—may be the most important qualification, followed closely or equaled by the second—how he or she approaches the task of translating—and it is the first that comes in last place, since minor lapses in a knowledge of the language, history, and culture may result in mistakes that are, in a beautifully written, generally faithful version, fairly easily corrected, whereas a misconception of the task of the translator and, worse, an inability to write well will doom the entire book through its every sentence.
Halfway there
A badly written translation, we could imagine, has been abandoned in a state of transition. What is written is not natural English, it does not sound right, yet now it exists, its very existence seems to justify it. It is certainly a translation of sorts, because it is no longer French—it is now English. But it is not English as any gifted native English writer would write it.
It could be considered an earlier stage of a finished good translation. It needs some rewriting, some different vocabulary choices. But often it is left at that stage and published.
Collaborating with the dead
Madame Bovary is the first book I’ve translated that has already been translated many times into English. Since I looked again and again at about eleven of the other translations—a twelfth as I made changes for the paperback edition—I came to know them well.
It did occur to me from time to time, as I studied them—as I felt, in effect, surrounded by them as a group—that a group effort might be interesting. This translator is better informed than I am about French history (or rather, I later realized, looking more carefully, she found someone good to do her endnotes); that one is especially clever at dialogue; another seems to have a naturally rich vocabulary; and yet another is a decent writer and might give a useful critique of the style of my version: together we would produce a wonderful translation. Of course, the earliest of us lived in the 1880s, and most of the others, too, have died by now. The other translations
I did not study the other translations during my first draft because I had to establish my own approach, my own style, and my own understanding of what I was reading before I could risk the rhythms and eccentricities of the others striking my ear and possibly creeping into my prose. (As when translating Proust’s Swann’s Way and most of the previous books I had done, I also did not read ahead more than a paragraph or at most a page, so that the material would be a surprise to me, and fresh.) Then, in the second draft, as I revised what I had written, I looked again and again at the previous translations—sometimes at all of them, in the case of a particularly sticky problem, but usually at five or six that were proving useful in different ways. Over time, I began inevitably to imagine the translators.
Lydia Davis. "Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary". Paris Review 198 (otoño de 2011).
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