Sloane McLean
All four of the assigned articles made me consider the issue of preserving an author's voice during translation, particularly the interview with Philip Gabriel ("How Haruki Murakami's '1Q84' Was Translated Into English"). Specifically, when asked if he felt "obligated" to attempt to match his portrayal of Murakami's literary voice to that of the other well-known translators in his field, I realized just how easily an author's voice can be altered depending on the personal choices a translator makes.
Before this course, when I had never given the concept of translation much thought, I assumed it was a relatively straight-forward task complicated by the fact that certain aspects of one language cannot be perfectly and exactly expressed in another. I assumed different translations of a work would have slight differences, but had envisioned the final products of two different translators to feel relatively the same. I know now that I was ignorant to just how important an individual translator's discretion is to how the final work will be received.
Case in point, I was amused by Wendy Lesser's strong opinions about the quality of Birnbaum's translations compared to Rubin's, and found her direct comparison of their openings to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle especially useful. I completely agree with her sentiment that Birnbaum and Rubin present two entirely different "Murakami's" to the audience. Even though the thoughts and actions of the character portrayed in this scene are relatively mundane, there was clearly still so much room for personal interpretation when translating that the end results have entirely different effects.
I do wonder how a "good" translator decides how to work around structural differences in two languages... As Lesser pointed out, Rubin's version of Murakami is phrased in a more traditional English-language layout ("the logic of cause-and-effect English sentence structure," as she calls it), while Birnbaum deviates from this entirely, perhaps injecting more of the original Japanese structure into his work. Is one more "correct" than the other, or is it just a matter of personal preference?
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