Terry and Rigs

Terry noted how in English, it is generally understood that “when a person makes a statement that isn’t immediately provable, he is making an assertion.” This reminded me of how our middle school teachers taught us to not use phrases like “I think”, “I feel”, “I believe” in formal papers because it is already assumed that the writer is going to be expressing their thoughts and opinions in the text and using those phrases would weaken the paper.

Looking at Terry’s example from Miyamoto Musashi, of all the articles we’ve read so far, Terry has done the most edits/cutting out of a Japanese text when translating to English. His analysis is also interesting to read – the way he considers how much of the details in the Japanese text that English readers would actually need and cuts out everything else. I wonder if he would recommend going through the text and cutting out of the Japanese text – essentially editing the Japanese text – and then translate from the more concise Japanese to English, or if his examples were just an example of what he does mentally as he goes through the translation process. For my translations so far, I’ve tried to stick as closely to the original as possible, but I would like to apply Terry's strategy in future translations.

Riggs makes a really good point that a translator working with a text for a long time may not be able to see it objectively, and this is where the rest of the team – editors, rewriters, etc – have to help. The structuring of an English essay and paragraph is very clear and strict, and restructuring is necessary to successfully transfer the Japanese content to English. I feel like this may require more work than narrative texts. 

Something I’m curious about is, do translators attempt to make the translated versions about as long as the original text or does it just naturally end up being around the same length? So far, I feel like my translations have been pretty similar in length to the original, but that’s because I follow the original closely when translating; my poems haven’t been exactly the same length, but I also haven’t tried cutting out details. 

Tiffany