July29
I’ve been putting in a lot of work on translations this past few weeks, having gotten a few free lance jobs to work on. The only type of translation I work on is literary translation from Chinese to English, since it is the only thing I am moderately good at, and I have found it to be both challenging and fun.
Some thoughts on the whole process have been in my mind since the projects came in. For people who are monolingual, the whole experience of translation might seem to be something that anyone who knows two languages should be able to do easily. After all, if you are fluent in both languages, you just transfer the ideas from one language into another, right?
Well, no. It’s not like that, really. It’s not as if we’re addressing a math problem here, where one language system is equivalent to another, and all you have to do to translate is to set up the appropriate equation. Language doesn’t function that way at all, because language uses a completely different set of faculties than math does.
I’ve been trying to identify my process of translation while I was working on these projects over the past few weeks. For me, especially with literary translation, the first step is probably the hardest. What is required in the first step is understanding — not just getting the definitions of words (that’s easy), but really absorbing into your own mind how they are put together. You have to let the images dance around in the head, and see how they interact in the text you’re working with.
From there, it’s about finding the words to bring those images into your target language. My first drafts of translations usually come out very odd, as if I’ve suddenly become extraordinarily fluent in “Chinglish.” After a look through my first draft, my first thought is usually, “I didn’t even know I could use such broken English….”
From there, I usually go back and find the spots that are troubling just from a language perspective — things that are clearly not relaying the idea that was intended in the original piece. Well, let’s be honest — they’re a bunch of words put together that really don’t say much at all. I spend a lot of time with dictionaries here, seeing what angles of certain phrases I might have overlooked. It’s really, for me, a very fun part of the process, requiring a stretching of the mind to include things that it has seemed to ignore on its own initiative, without me realizing it has done so.
When I’ve begun to iron out the worst of the language problems, I usually try to get a little feedback from someone who understands both languages well. A second set of eyes often turns up more places where I’ve either made wrong assumptions about certain phrases, or perhaps not worded them very clearly in the translation. Armed with the feedback, I go back to work on tuning up the piece. By this time, I usually find that I am beginning to feel a good deal of attachment to the author’s original work, even if it was something that did not particularly jump out at me on my first reading. It seems that the ideas become a little more my own as I try to capture them for the friend who is helping me with my proofreading.
The next step, for me, is working on smoothing out awkward phrases, and also tweaking transitions so that the whole flows the way it should. It’s more a matter of polishing here than really doing a lot of writing or translating. I find, at this stage, that my thoughts are becoming more natural in English, and much less foreign.
After this brush-over, it is nice if I have someone who does not understand Chinese to help read the piece. I’ve found it very helpful to have a non-Chinese-speaker give feedback on whether or not the piece works to English-only (or at least English-predominantly) readers. And, I’m very lucky to have some friends who are nice enough to offer assistance here!
It is interesting to think through how the process works for me. I have other friends who have described their translation process rather differently (especially if it is not literary writing). For me, though, there is something very unique that happens in the process of attempting to take hold of someone else’s thoughts and make them available to other readers. It’s as if I have to make the thoughts my own in order to express them, but at the same time have to be extremely careful to make sure they remain the author’s thoughts in transmission.
It is really hard work, but something I find myself enjoying more and more as I get further into it.