Terry and Riggs

 Terry would agree with Edward Fitzgerald’s statement of “the live Dog better than the dead Lion.” I found the Fitzgerald’s statement dryly amusing as he suggests that however different from the original the translator work is, at least it exists—but at the same time wonder if that is true: is taking an author’s work and changing it to the point its species change from lion to dog preferable to no translation? Along that same vein of thought, the way Terry revised the source work into easier to understand Japanese first, then translating that revised version into English is an interesting way to go about translation. I think that would help in translating meaning and content but takes away the author’s writing style. However, I did like Terry’s translation of a sentence from Yoshikawa Eiji’s Miyamoto Musashi. I used to read a lot of novels in middle school and high school and Terry’s translation reads like something I would actually read—it’s Anglicized and the Japanese names that do appear don’t affect my reading. So now I’m wondering how important [the author’s] style in translation is. When translating the passages from novels for homework I tried to keep the translation and style (sentence structure, etc) as close to the original as possible but now I’m seeing that some of the stylistic choices could very well be just how Japanese people write and not exactly specific to just the author. How much of the source writing is influenced by a Japanese writing style and how much of it is the author’s writing style and is it even possible to separate the two and do away with the Japanese style of rhetorical questions, repetition, etc while keeping the author’s own style along with the content in translation?

Riggs' transmigration concept of translation is fun for me because I’ve read quite a lot of transmigration themed web novels. There’s a pattern of Japanese to English translators saying translation is not quite what people think it is: often it will go through huge changes, and this feels truer for essays, articles, titles than for novels. Riggs gives insight on the role editors/re-writers play in the translation process which is nice to read about. Articles will have to be restructured, topic sentences added, etc. Titles will have to be crafted from the content of the article and not from the Japanese title. I felt the direct translations in the examples Riggs gave were pretty decent (though the non-verbatim English titles were much more eye-catching). I’m not confident enough to completely stray from the verbatim translation of the title of an article but I will do my best. (owo)9

 

Lesley