Dear Jon Carroll,
Just last night at BookShop West Portal, I asked Julia Glass
a question about translations because it’s been on my mind since I read two
different translations of Turgenev’s Fathers
and Sons. I had one on Audible, and
I thought it was so clever that I wanted to mark it up in my print version,
which turned out to be a different translation.
I found the section of the book where I thought the dialogue was so
clever, but it wasn’t translated into dialogue at all; it was told as the protagonist’s
thoughts! Isn’t there a big difference
between thinking something and saying it
out loud? I would think that the author has the right to decide whether
something is spoken or thought, but I wouldn’t think that was the prerogative
of the translator. But now, reading
about formal versus dynamic equivalence in your column, I’m beginning to
wonder.
It was several years ago that I noticed this discrepancy,
but it made me aware of the difference translators can make.
So now I made every effort to find out who the
translator is for the Audible version of books, but sometimes this information—so
readily available in print—is not available on Audible.
What do you think about this?
Your reader in the original English,
Tina
No comments:
Post a Comment