Terry and Riggs Readings – Aaron

 Right away, I saw one of those analogies you told us about—Terry compares translations to women, saying "if they are faithful, they are not beautiful; if they are beautiful, they are not faithful." Perhaps an analogy that would not fly these days, but I nonetheless see his point. As we have seen before in readings, a translation should not improve on the original; if it does, it is a bad translation.

Terry says that iû made mo naku should not be translated because phrases like "needless to say" and "it goes without saying" are signs of bad writing. Needless to say, I understand that English writing has definitely changed since this was written, but I disagree with that claim. So maybe I won't necessarily take this advice. But I'll have to see what I choose to do when I encounter this situation; maybe I will understand where he is coming from.

In general however, the points he mentioned are things I can agree with, and stem from the differences between English and Japanese as languages. Being very different languages, the writing styles are naturally going to be different. For example, he mentions that rhetorical questions are common in Japanese writing but looked down upon in English, and I agree with that; if I saw a rhetorical question in some work, it would feel patronizing, or like it was written for children.

I thought it was interested when Terry mentioned that itadakimasu is translated as silence in English, and vice versa. But it got me thinking, because in movies and TV shows, you cannot do this. Even if a foreign viewer doesn't know itadakimasu, they will here the characters speak, and if there are no subtitles, or there is silence instead of dubbed audio, they will feel like they missed something. For this kind of media, a translation has to be chosen, and there are rarely any good options. Phrases like "bon appetite", "thanks for the meal", or "let's dig in" are ones I've seen, but none of them work that well, since in English you simply wouldn't say anything.

Looking at the intro of Rigg's text, I immediately understand where they are coming from. When translating an article for an international audience, you are converting something that was written for one specific audience into something that should be understood by a wider audience, and that requires many changes, as the rules for logical argument, as well as what concepts are understood to the reader, will differ between languages. When I translated the article excerpt we were given, I got the distinct impression that a foreign reader may not understand some of the things that the author assumes the reader would know. I tried my best to compensate for this by being clear, and at one point I added an extra clarifying phrase. But I didn't change much structure-wise, and I have a fear that if my translation were to be actually given to readers, they would have trouble understanding what was going on. In general, I agree with Rigg's points, though I'm a little skeptical that major structural changes would be necessary for an article. That might be changing the author's voice a little too much. But perhaps it is necessary in this case...