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/lit/ - Literature

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8486413 No.8486413 [Reply] [Original]

What makes a translation 'good'? If the translator is a kind of purist and translates everything word for word, exactly as he can, is he a better translator than one who tries to recreate the feelings that the author is trying to convey? How much liberty do you think a translator can take with a piece of work before it becomes inaccurate?

>> No.8486421

>How much liberty do you think a translator can take with a piece of work before it becomes inaccurate

translating is transforming the work. No way around that.

That being said, i prefer a tight interpretation over a purist translation with weird sentence structure.

>> No.8487105
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8487105

>>8486413
The perfect purist translation is a spook, especially when talking literary translation
The more recent translation theory I've been exposed to seems to have embraced what literary theory has to offer, namely Bakhtin and the notion of novelistic discourse, or 'uneigentliche Rede', which is the better term for describing what ancient rhetorics called the 'improprietas' use of words where words are assigned an extra, non-standardised meaning, like when paraphrase someone and use words that were not his own, and metasemes also rarely if ever allow for 'direct translation' (a spook)

>> No.8487268

>>8486413
It's like doing a cover of a song.

>> No.8487893

>>8487105
What the fuck did I just read?

>> No.8488729

TRADUTTORE, TRADITORE

>> No.8488744

>>8486413
Word for word is impossible and dumb. If you could do a word for word translation, then it's not actually a different language, it's just a code.
An important thing that a lot of people who want direct translations forget about is the experience of reading something. If a book uses normal modern sentence structure, and has characters speaking in a naturalistic way, that should be preserved in a translation. Too often an overly literal translation has characters talking like weird robots.