A translator's attempt at why linguistic habits matter

 In his article, Deutscher reported on the possibility that languages shapes how a speaker thinks. In a limited number of ways, at least. His observations are based only on the difference between how speakers think about gender, space and other hidden rules governed by a language’s grammatical rules. The examples he gave do not apply to the difference between English and Japanese though, so here I will try to extend his argument to how the two languages use pronouns differently. In English, a person can get away with saying “I” without providing more personal information, whereas in Japanese a person must choose between an array of first-person pronouns, each of which convey the gender, status and other information about the speaker. In English, a person can just address their listeners by the second-person pronoun “you”, whereas in Japanese the listeners are usually addressed by their names, titles or roles, or be omitted from the sentence altogether. Deutscher would argue that Japanese requires its speakers to reveal and understand more information about each other than English does.

Why does it matter to us translators, then, that the people who wrote source texts have a different habit of thinking that differs from the habit shared by our readers? It connects to the problem of literal translation. If sentences from Japanese were translated as is into English, the readers may be distracted by fragments that appear unnatural, conveniently explained by Deutscher’s argument. The differing habits should also help a translator decide whether it is suitable to modify source texts to sound more natural to the readers. It would be acceptable to replace names, titles and roles with generic pronouns if they sound more natural to an English-speaking ear, for example.

 

- Marcus

Schleiermacher and Deutscher - Alex

 I enjoyed Deutscher's writing a lot. It was interesting to hear him talk about how language affects cognition, because I have studied that concept thoroughly in my classes as a psychology major. Specifically, perception psychology and cognitive psychology focus a lot on language and the mind. It's fascinating, because while our native language doesn't limit what abstract concepts we can comprehend, it does play a huge role in how we perceive the world. For instance, some languages  have many more words for certain things than we do in English. In class once, we talked about how Russian has specific, separate words for different kinds of blue. In a study, English speakers failed to differentiate these shades as quickly as Russian speakers, likely because our brains are not wired to distinguish them as well as the Russian speakers. We can perceive them if we try, but it comes much less naturally to us. 

Schleiermacher also captures a dilemma that I'm sure we're all very familiar with at this point—do we as translators prioritize faithfulness? Or how it sounds? When we focus on one, we risk losing the other. I think, as we progress through the semester and I reflect on it more, I realized that there probably isn't one solution. The best outcome is trying to balance both, and it greatly depends on the situation. 

Schleiermacher and Deutscher- A Response

 I really enjoyed reading Deutscher’s musings on the ability of language. If I’m not wrong, I read some of Whorf’s ideas or very similar ones in a language and neuroscience class I took my first year of college. That said, I like how he differentiates between what we convey and if we can convey certain things. I think the implication of the ‘things we must convey’ has implications for translation: namely, almost necessitating adding things, or making things which had been made vague explicit or vice versa. I find the rumination on how it could possibly affect gender norms and culture interesting as well, and I think that could lend into how localization tends to occur, recalling the example of the case of the explanation of the girl’s self-consciousness in the work translated by Carpenter and Mizumura.

The dilemma that Schleiermacher presents is one we have essentially been discussing for a lot  of class, though I appreciate how he goes over it— do we localize things to provide a similar reading experience or keep things faithful to a T? I’m still not entirely sure where I stand on this. I think there are some works where the fact they are slower and meandering as in Japanese contributes to the overall effect of the story, so being faithful would be appropriate. That said, as in the case of ‘Grotesque’, i instinctively find myself against how the editors changed or sections of the book to keep it fast paced and provide an experience that is just as enjoyable to American audience as the Japanese audience. That said, there is truth that a perfect translation would risk sounding unnatural, and that may give the reader a changed experience as well. I think the best one can do is try to manage between the two to the best they can.

Reshma

Schleiermacher and Deutscher

 It is difficult to decide between staying faithful to the original or localizing as best as possible and I found Schleiermacher’s advice regarding this helpful: “Whatever, therefore, strikes the judicious reader of the original in this respect as characteristic, as intentional, as having an influence on tone and feeling, as decisive for the mimetic or musical accompaniment of speech: all these things our translator must render.” Basically, translate whatever makes an impression and translate it in a way that gives readers the same effect as it did for readers of the original text. This is something we see across all the articles on translation, and I think it highlights the importance of the translator reading though the text beforehand first, as the translator is, first and foremost, a reader.

Schleiermacher mentioned how you can decide to be faithful to the rhythm and melody of the text or be faithful to dialectic and grammar, and how some sort of sacrifice will always have to be made. He talked about how what sacrifice is made depends on the translator and what aspect of the original they like  – and this is interesting because it is completely possible for different translators to have different impressions of a text or like different aspects of it and thus produce different translations, so how do we know if what we’re sacrificing or focusing on is the right one?

I have heard of the phenomenon of different languages influencing the way we think, and how people act differently and have different personalities/mindsets when speaking or thinking in a different language. It makes sense that it is because of the vocabulary used and the focus of the  language, and I also think it’s because of the culture the language is a part of that affects the way people think and act. There’s also the phenomenon of sounding different/speaking in a different tone or pitch in different languages.

Interestingly, despite not assigning gender to inanimate objects in English, it is common for English speakers to refer to their cars or boats as she, and home countries as motherland. It expresses emotional attachment and endearment but unlike other languages, the association isn’t made naturally in the language. I can see how this distances the relationship between English speakers and the objects around us. And while European languages and English’s she/he makes it very specific who the speaker is referring to, the minimal use of pronouns in Japanese and the pronunciation of pronouns in Chinese makes it hard to figure out who the speaker is talking about – the narrator, someone else, a boy, a girl, an item? I found that interesting because that allows for more chances at misunderstandings in Chinese and Japanese. 

Tiffany

Schleiermacher and Deutscher

Schleiermacher writes, “whoever makes the sacrifice of writing in another language for the sake of scientific inquiry will be able to write freely and without constraint, rather than secretly translating as he goes along, only when he can lose himself in his subject matter.” I don’t particularly understand this statement but from what I think he’s saying—that it’s much easier to write in another language than to translate—I find it quite true. When I wrote letters to my grandparents as a kid, I thought and wrote in Chinese instead of thinking of what I want to say in English, then writing the translated version of that on paper. Similarly for homework from previous Japanese classes, it’s much easier to write directly in Japanese than to write something in English and attempting to translate from that because it tends to mess up the thought process and make grammar much more difficult than it needs to be.

Gendered objects were one of the hardest parts of learning French in high school and is one of the things that make French very different from English. However, I don’t think English is exactly without this gender system either—e.g., in English people often assign the pronoun “she” to boats and to countries/land—but it’s definitely not as prevalent as in French or other languages nor so obvious. I find it so interesting how depending on the language, the speakers will imagine different gendered voices for certain objects. It feels like it may limit their perception and the possibilities. But at the same time, it allows chances for meaningful messages via voice vs object (e.g., giving a lamp—a feminine object—a masculine voice) that may be lost if the language was in English.

A somewhat long time ago my brother said that people’s personality changes depending on the language they speak. He mentioned that I was much quieter when speaking in Mandarin compared to English. I noticed it too, but I attributed it to being more comfortable speaking in English due to reading English books all the time and school and being less confident in speaking Mandarin because I only talked to my parents in Mandarin and there wasn't much opportunity to learn more vocab compared to the ones used daily. At that time my brother knew English, Mandarin Chinese, French (proficiency in that order) and was learning Russian. He demonstrated himself saying things in each language and he did sound different—whether from a personality difference or just from the sound of the language itself though, I couldn’t tell. I thought it was an interesting statement.

 -Lesley

Deutscher and Schleiermacher Comments - Kadin

Schleiermacher suggests that a translated piece of work should produce a result that should either please the author or the reader, and not to mix the two perspectives. I am not quite sure what to think about this statement. When I thought about it some more, this just seems like another way to phrase whether you value faithfulness more or clarity more. As I had mentioned before, I think that invoking emotions towards readers take precedence over the original author. After how the last two readings talked about the financial importance of selling books. I think that a book that has an intended audience is more likely to succeed in the market than one that is truly faithful to the original.

In Deutscher's article, I've found something he said in the beginning particularly intriguing. "The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time." There have been an uncountable number of times where I try to find a word without a linguistical equivalent in another language. Of the languages I know, from English to Japanese to Mandarin to Cantonese. There are slangs, words and phrases where I know the sentiment can never be fully understood by someone who doesn't speak the language often, and hence a part of the meaning will always get lost when you attempt to translate it literally. I think that the only way for a reader to grasp the meaning fully is by exposure to the culture of the language itself. I also wonder whether foreigners learning a language perceive the same meaning behind certain words like a native speaker would.

Evan - Deutscher and Schleiermacher

 The sentiment of Schleiermacher's entire text was incredibly intriguing, but I think the most interesting point in his writing came near the end when he wrote:

"What one produces in a foreign tongue is not original' rather, memories of some particular writer or perhaps the style of a certain period, representing, as it were, some general personage, appear before the mind's eye almost like a living image in the outside world, and the imitation of this image guides and defines what one produces. Thus rarely does anything come about by this means that might have true worth beyond mimetic precision, and one's pleasure in this popular trick is all the more innocuous as the person being imitated is readily visible throughout."

I found this passage particularly thought-provoking, as it echoes an idea that we read about back in September, with Seidensticker's idea of translators being counterfeiters. I've noticed that that analogy has stuck with a lot of us, and for good reason, as it is difficult for a more apt analogy to be found. 

Deutscher's article, similarly, had many thought-provoking aspects to it-- most notably the idea that to some degree, language informs perception. The implications of this idea are vast, and I think that when thinking about language in its relation to culture, there is a lot of merit behind it.

Duetscher and Schleiermacher - Connie

 It is so interesting to me that people grow up with different perspectives on things surrounding us like the example of giving inanimate objects masculine and feminine genders that Duetscher mentioned in his article. I did take Latin for several years back in middle/high school and found it a bit weird that every single word either took a masculine gender, a feminine gender or a neuter gender which meant it applied to neither masc or fem and was always confused on tests on which genders they were because how do you really categorize that? What is it based off on? It's so interesting that different languages categorize the same objects differently based on the object's appearance or its traits. The geographic language is so complex to me because at a young age, you've trained your mind to have this constant state of awareness of your surroundings that no matter what your orientation is, you'll know the directions based on your surroundings that its second nature and that a speaker of a geographic language will see things differently than non-geographic languages. 

Deutscher and Schleiermacher Readings Brief Comment

It is very interesting to see that the way we think, see and perceive time, movement, and objects are influenced by our mother tongue. I wonder if translating from Spanish to German would cause a headache for S-G and G-S translators since they have to constantly change the genders of the objects. The way I perceive daily decision-making has sure changed since I moved out of Japan, but I am not sure if I was influenced by the change of language I speak or think or the culture that I am surrounded with. 

After reading Schleiermacher's text, what I found most interesting about his idea was that the greatest difficulty that translators must confront is the moderation in translating with "foreign likeness." I have encountered this issue when translating English text to Japanese text where the translated product sounds a bit foreign. Sometimes, some words cannot quite be expressed the same way in other languages, and bending the text to sustain the original art with a feeling of the foreign. I believe that it depends on the context to decide whether to offset the foreign likeness and bend the original work or translate it according to the original work with a foreign likeness. 

- Airi

Deutscher and Schleiermacher Response - Afiq

 Reading the excerpt from Schleiermacher, I thought it was a really interesting concept of the two methods: either moving the audience or moving the writer. And to not be able to entirely mix the two, I think I also do agree with that, as it makes for awkward translating when having to constantly choose between keeping it more faithful or to make it more localized. This is not to say it can't be both in the slightest in my opinion, but for it to be a good enough translation, I would think that the translator would need to lean more heavily on one side than the other and to firmly stand by that ratio of faithfulness and localization throughout the whole translation. 

In Deustcher's article, it was really mind-blowing to think that our native language really plays a part in the way we think and the way we perceive certain things/situations. I never once gave that a thought but now that I think about it, I can see why and how that happens. Now I also wonder how having more than one native language would then affect the person's point of view and thoughts? Would they have a wider view of the world compared monolinguals? Then, how would these perceived thoughts differ with someone who becomes natively fluent in another 2 or more languages when they're much older? I was also amazed reading about the Guugu Yimithirr language, as it shows that not only can native languages change a person's perceived view of the world mentally, but it can also change it physically. I also think constant repetition plays a part in how native Guugu Yimithirr speakers are able to have such astounding spatial awareness, as it's been drilled into their heads that they need to be able to do it in order to communicate. This goes off of the topic of spoken communication but this also might show that it is easier for a person to master a set of skills if they start from really young and is consistent with the application of said skills.

For-profit

Rebecca Copeland’s translation of Kirino Natsuo’s Grotesque was published by a for-profit publisher. Lots of negotiations happened behind the decision to modify the original text and cut out scenes and characters. Or were there?

 

Copeland mostly “agreed with the editorial instinct” even though she was used to doing authentic translation with university press. But to agree with the instinct is to sacrifice her own judgment. Editors cut out the final pages of the book, arguing that the last chapter was inconsistent with the rest—they were saying that the composition of the original text was a result of bad writing to the eyes of American readers. Would Copeland agree with this? Afterall, cutting out unsophisticated texts is what editors do, right? I think Copeland’s agreement reflects not her judgment but her inexperience working with for-profit publishers. She came up with the clever, moral compromise that reshaping the original text is acceptable if it can recreate the same reading experience for American readers. But did she really think that Grotesque would not have its same impact on American readers as it had on herself? Would it still be acceptable to reshape the text just to really ensure that American readers could feel the same sensations?

 

-Marcus