Seidensticker Comments - Dawson

    While reading the start of the article, the passage relating to the difficulties of translating Shakespeare, it made me realize that the medium itself matters immensely in translation.  Fukushuu sounds very bad compared to Vengeance given the context.  It lacks the same punch, and considerably so.  But this is because the medium itself constricts the translation.  I doubt the translator had much other choice.  Novels have a lot more freedom.  They have a lot to play with.  All they have to worry about is text, so they can be as free as they want in translating the text as well as possible and take as many liberties with the text as they need to in order to maintain the text's feel.  However, for more limited mediums, say plays or a television dub, they are constricted by the length of the line, the movement of the actors/characters and their mouths.  All of this greatly constricts how much they are able to fiddle with the text to get the desired feeling, since they also have to match these other constraints.  

    I really like what he says about translation being a series of choices that are all impossible and all inadequate, and that one just uses their intuition to make the least bad of the choices.  A perfect translation cannot exist, for no word has a one to one correspondence between Japanese and English, and every person has a different feel for words, even within the same language.  Thus, to fully translate someone's feelings, someone who probably has an entirely different way of thinking due to being raised into an entirely different culture, into a different language whose words can't even fully capture that way of thinking, when you yourself get a different feel from the words they wrote than they do - obviously that would be an impossible task!  I just found the part about every piece being between a series of inadequate choices especially topical, personally, since that was basically the style I took when translating the second homework.  Whenever a choice didn't come clearly to me, I'd write down the choices I thought of, both or all three of which would feel inadequate to me, and then I went back later and took the one I then felt was least bad given the context of every other choice I had ended up making and of the text itself.  

    And sometimes you know the choice is horribly inadequate, but you're left with no choice but to go with it anyways, because you can't for the life of you think of anything else, like him with the "bottom of the night turned white" line.  It's still inadequate, he knows, but there is no more adequate option.  So he is stuck with something that still comes nowhere near to the beauty of the original, but there are simply no other options, really.  Just another instance showing how difficult translation is, especially for languages so far apart.  I do actually think intuition for it can be trained, and that is by reading a lot.  Reading lots and lots and lots of your native language to know what good writing is in your native language, plus lots and lots and lots of the language you want to translate, so you can get the best feel for the language as possible.  Personally, I know I still have nowhere near enough intuition, for I can see that actual good translations will often end up changing the text wildly, yet still hold the same feelings.  I, however, can never even think up those kind of changes in the first place as options, and I am sure I very often misunderstand the feel of words because I still need far more experience.  Especially where he talks about translating bad writing as bad writing and good writing as good writing - I need to read a lot more Japanese to be able to clearly tell what is bad Japanese vs good Japanese!  I can still only really tell subconsciously over the course of an entire text, rather than consciously on a sentence by sentence basis.