Translationstudiesforfree: Ten historical texts about translation

More free goodies for translation studies researchers. This time, it's interesting texts from the history of translation theory. Some of these are downloadable as pdf files, others readable online. (I haven't quite worked out the Google Library setup yet, but it should work OK.)

1. Etienne Dolet's La manière de bien traduire d'une langue en aultre (1540)
2. Earl of Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse (1684) 
3. Charles Batteux's Principles of Translation (1760)
4. Alexander Fraser Tytler's Essay on the Principles of Translation (1797)
5. Francis Newman, Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice (1861)
6. Matthew Arnold's On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford (1860). The links are to Google Library; versions of Arnold's and Newman's texts can also be downloaded here. 
7. Thomas Norton's preface to his translation of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion.
8. A 1905 edition of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, one of the best known translations in English literature
9. Castelvetro's Lettera di Lodovico Castelvetro scritta a m. Guasparro Calori a Roma del traslatare at the Galileo digital library (not the most intuitive layout ever)
10. Jean le Rond d’Alembert's Observations sur l'art de traduire (1763). This is part of Julie Candler Hayes' impressive text bank entitled 'French Translators: 1600-1800: An Online Anthology of Prefaces and Criticism' which includes works by Guillaume de Colletet, Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt, Anne Dacier, the Abbé Desfontaines and many others. 

Flora Ross Amos's 1920 book Early Theories of Translation is available to download from archive.org.

Readers working on translation history may also be interested in the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue (a searchable, analytical and annotated list of all translations out of and into all languages printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland before 1641; also includes all translations out of all languages into English printed abroad before 1641.)  

Visual pleasure and vintage subtitles

A snippetlet for those of my readers who enjoy film translations of yore. This clip is from an Italian release of the 1947 musical extravaganza Variety Girl, directed by George Marshall and starring just about everybody who was anybody:

In this sequence Pearl Bailey, in her first film role, part-speaks, part-sings the song 'Tired':

Italy is so well known as a dubbing territory - indeed, almost *the* dubbing territory par excellence - that nobody talks much about the role of subtitling, particularly in the first decades of sound. I did not know that Italian distributors of the 1940s ever subtitled songs, but shall be keeping an eye out from now on.

And look at the font! The size of it! The lovely clean lines of it! As the kind poster of the clip, EmeliusBisestile, observes wistfully, and as I have mentioned before, fonts from the 30s and 40s offer a kind of viewing pleasure which is lacking in resubtitled versions with more functional, modern fonts, for all their legibility and fancy dropshadows, etc.

And yet - I feel that such fonts are wonderfully charming, but I am uncomfortably aware that I cannot say what and wherefore. Are there any font nerds sorry, typeface experts out there who could do a font identification on these subtitles for me? I can just about identify it as sans-serif, but I would love to know more - what it's called, where else it was used, how it evokes that sense of period...? If print texts are multimodal in their use of typeface, and therefore typeface itself is an element of the translation of printed texts (see here for some more thoughts on this) then what's the role of the subtitle typeface, superimposed on the image, as an element of translation? What kind of meaning-making potential does it have (apart from inspiring hopeless nostalgia in geeks like me)? Comments welcome.

The many languages of Disney

I'm writing a piece at the moment on language policy and audiovisual translation, so I was interested to see this video doing the rounds on social media, featuring a twenty-five-language version of the song 'Let It Go' from the film Frozen:

It is a nice idea, even if it feels a little plastic (e.g. in the uncanny voice matching; or has this just been very carefully remixed for marketing purposes?). (And don't get me started on the costume/gender side of things - spontaneously slashing the dress halfway up the thigh as an empowering gesture? Really? Sigh.)

For the curious who lack the three and a half minutes necessary to watch the clip, the languages involved are: English, French from France, German, Dutch, Mandarin, Swedish, Japanese, Latin American Spanish (interestingly), Polish, Hungarian, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Korean, Serbian, Cantonese, Portuguese, Bahasa Malaysia, Russian, Danish, Bulgarian, Norwegian, Thai, Canadian French and Flemish.

I find myself wondering is this really all the languages into which the film has been dubbed, or just a useful round number which fitted into the running time of the song? Will this film be released only with subtitles in Greek, Czech, Slovenian, etc.? (I guess very possibly, because some of these are traditionally subtitling territories; readers please feel free to confirm or deny). Or will it skip some of these territories entirely? In what languages, if any, will this film play in India? In Africa? What form(s) of translation might it have into Arabic? Enquiring minds want to know.

UPDATE 1 June 2014: There's been a lot more discussion of this online since I posted this, which answers some of the questions above. Jayne Fox kindly posted a link in the comments to this article confirming that the film had been localised in 41 languages.

There's an excellent post by Elias Muhanna on the New Yorker blog this week about the treatment of the film in Arabic - it turns out that there is only one dub and it's into Modern Standard Arabic rather than the more usual Egyptian Arabic. Muhanna gives some nice back-translations into English of what the characters can actually be considered to be singing. The comments are worth reading too.

Muhanna also links to a Youtube fan video which offers snatches of the film in English, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Canadian French, Cantonese, Castilian Spanish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Lithuanian, Malay, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

I make that 39 languages. Modern Standard Arabic is not included, and apparently there's a Filipino cover of 'Frozen' as well which may mean the film was localised there too. The question of India and the rest of Africa still seems to be an open one.

UPDATE 29 August 2016: The article on audiovisual subtitling research and policy that I was writing when I originally posted this is now out and can be found in the journal Target (paywalled, alas) at https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/target.28.2/toc. 

Translators on translation

I'd love to see more pieces by translators about getting into the nitty-gritty of texts. Sometimes we ask our students to analyse translations against the translators' own discourse (from prefaces, interviews, notes etc.). It can be tricky to find these at short notice, except perhaps in the case of older translation prefaces which can sometimes be tracked down via repositories like Project Gutenberg.

So here are some suggestions for finding translators talking about their work.

The Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas has collected interviews with a number of eminent translators, many from Spanish.

Words Without Borders has a series of posts 'From the Translator'. 

There is a growing collection of pieces by translators on the authors they have translated at http://authors-translators.blogspot.co.uk/p/translators.html. 

The Necessary Fiction blog has collected a number of Translators' Notes.

Peter Bush's 2003 essay on translating Juan Goytisolo remains a great point of reference and shows how enlightening it can be to look at successive drafts of the same passage.

Lydia Davis has been widely interviewed about her translations of Proust and of Flaubert. For instance, peeping out from behind the Paris Review paywall are the intriguing opening paragraphs of this essay.

We have previously mentioned William Weaver's wonderful piece on translating Gadda.

And Daniel Hahn is nearing the end of a diary about his translation of a novel by Saavedra (it might be worth saving these pages as you go, because I don't know how long they will be available; a previous blog on translating Agualusa was later collected and published and is no longer on the web).

UPDATE 14 November 2014: There's a new blog on the block called brouillon, which collects translators' reflections on specific knotty words and phrases. There are just a few posts at time of writing but it looks very promising! 

Intellectual Property Rights in translation: a research project

Please note that this post was removed at the request of the colleagues running the research project, as they had received sufficient responses.

#translationquery: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Well what do you know, more random thoughts about form in translation...

This spring I read David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - absorbing, absolutely unputdownable book by a preposterously gifted writer - and as I laid into chapter 39, I found this:

Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunchbacked makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed from kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries' vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers, heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters' sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottle-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of the Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night's rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself. 

The rhyme sneaks in so sweetly that it was several lines before I realised what I was reading. And then it disappears again as seamlessly as it appeared. The use of rhyme in the passage doesn't seem structurally or thematically motivated, as far as I can see - it is not repeated elsewhere in the novel, it apparently just happens, because of reasons.

I am curious to know how the translators rendered this amazing passage.
If any well-disposed readers of this blog happen to have a copy to hand of the French translation by Manuel Berri (Éditions Alto, 2012)

or of the Italian translation by Maurizio Bartocci (Frassinelli, 2010) (not that I would know the translator's name from the publisher's website because it appears not to be listed, tsk)

or of the German translation by Volker Oldenburg (Rowohlt, 2012)

or of the Spanish translation by Víctor V. Úbeda (Duomo Ediciones, 2011) (not that I would know the translator's name from the publisher's website because, grrrrrrrrr, etc......)

please feel free to get in touch with a comment about it - or better yet, share it. Indeed, if you have access to any translation of this passage please do feel free to write in; although I would need a back-translation into English to make any sense at all of translations into other languages, I am still curious.