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iteechesinglish's review against another edition
informative
3.0
Parts of this were really good. I liked a lot of the insights about how translation works. The most interesting bits were the ones where Bellos discusses how the European Union works and the skills required to be an interpreter. He kind of lost me in the end talking about what translation is or isn't, and I definitely felt that the author had a chip on his shoulder and was overly defensive about his profession. Overall it was a good read if you're interested in the topic, but a little slow in places.
rlse's review against another edition
3.0
Very interesting and accessible. The focused chapters allowed me to spend time on my particular interests while I skimmed others.
ashleylm's review against another edition
4.0
I liked it, but it was an unusal experience. Many books are straight lines: we deal with this, then we deal with that, etc., but this book was like a spiral out from the center, and you continually felt like you were brushing against the same topics, over and over, only from a different viewpoint. It's not a bad thing, it's like an impressionist painting rather than an Ingres, sometimes you're not sure what you're getting, which suits a book whose main thrust seems to be that Translation is not what you think it is.
It was interesting at all points to read. Never did I think "I'm bored, move to the next subject," and the author speaks from his own knowledge (he's apparently a fairly successful translator, as far as translators go, which is apparently not far according to the author) and has truly unique points to make.
I'm a fan.
Can't give five stars because I save that rating for the ones that make me laugh, cry, move me in some way, that I love so much I'm sure I'll re-read, or are just evidently staggering achievements. This is a really good, interesting book about translation, but until Goodread puts in a 4.5 option, it's a very good 4 star book for me.
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve!
It was interesting at all points to read. Never did I think "I'm bored, move to the next subject," and the author speaks from his own knowledge (he's apparently a fairly successful translator, as far as translators go, which is apparently not far according to the author) and has truly unique points to make.
I'm a fan.
Can't give five stars because I save that rating for the ones that make me laugh, cry, move me in some way, that I love so much I'm sure I'll re-read, or are just evidently staggering achievements. This is a really good, interesting book about translation, but until Goodread puts in a 4.5 option, it's a very good 4 star book for me.
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve!
laurabuljon's review against another edition
slow-paced
2.75
It's endless but has some interesting chapters
altruest's review against another edition
5.0
Really, very good.
Picked this up because I tried to learn Spanish this year and have been watching a lot of translated Japanese media (fully in the vtuber hole), and I'm starting to see the cracks around the way we teach and experience different languages in English. This was such a good choice, I absolutely adored it. Bellos takes a complicated subject and breaks it down in manageable chapters and topics, with insight and understated but very effective humor. I constantly had the "Oh my God, yeah you're right!" thought as he explained how he thought about and how the field thinks about translation in a way I've never considered. Really if you are interested in the process of translation at all, you should pick this up.
5/5 stars, I loved it.
Picked this up because I tried to learn Spanish this year and have been watching a lot of translated Japanese media (fully in the vtuber hole), and I'm starting to see the cracks around the way we teach and experience different languages in English. This was such a good choice, I absolutely adored it. Bellos takes a complicated subject and breaks it down in manageable chapters and topics, with insight and understated but very effective humor. I constantly had the "Oh my God, yeah you're right!" thought as he explained how he thought about and how the field thinks about translation in a way I've never considered. Really if you are interested in the process of translation at all, you should pick this up.
5/5 stars, I loved it.
spacestationtrustfund's review
2.0
Iris Murdoch described the act of translation as similar to "opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge."
I had complicated feelings with this one. An issue I've had with David Bellos's writing in our previous encounters is that he often doesn't fully explore the ideas he posits, i.e., he starts off strong, but then either tapers off or falls into an unrelated digression. This was moderately amusing (and admittedly apt) when reading his work on Victor Hugo, but doesn't lend itself well to a book on translation studies. As Suzy Kassem said, "Never trust the translation or interpretation of something without first trusting its interpreter."
Bellos, himself a professional translator of French to English, occupies a very privileged position within the loose-knit community. He does not delve into the political nature of translation, and in fact fails to discuss the implications of translation any further than the cool linguistic quirks that may pose problems for an individual translator. Translating a text is political, and not translating a text is as well. One pertinent example would be safety brochures that are only in British English and not native Indian languages; English was the sole language used for administrative purposes as well as in higher education until India's independence from Britain in 1947, at which point Indian legislators faced the challenge of choosing a language or languages for official communication as well as communication between different linguistic regions within the country, which has the world's fourth-highest number of distinct languages. The current official languages of the United Nations are Arabic, (Mandarin) Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish; official UN documents are made available in all of the above. There are currently 193 member countries of the United Nations. Do you see the problem?
To translate a text the translator must first decide what it means and its intention, in order to ensure that the text is translated consistently and appropriately. Any hint of non-literal phrasing complicates the situation tenfold. As an example, take this line, from "The Lion King":
There are multiple "correct" options, of course; in an instance which uses non-literal language, to translate indirectly—as would be necessary—would be to translate incorrectly; or, perhaps, incompletely. There are other, simpler, examples: the French word for "stranger" and "foreigner" are the same (étranger); English doesn't distinguish between visiting a place and visiting a person; Mandarin Chinese doesn't conjugate or pluralise; Russian doesn't have articles while other languages do; and so on. Author and translator Michael Coulson described translation as a difficult and thankless task, noting that "in the end there are no degrees of success, only degrees of failure," and I'm inclined to agree. An exact translation is possible only within the context of mathematics and the like, i.e., "two and two make four," "deux et deux font quatre"; outside of this, everything is an approximation at best. There is no such thing as a truly perfect, ideal, or "correct" translation.
Other minor quibbles I had with Bellos's approach include his tendency towards overstatement and generalisation (i.e., he says that English is the only lingua franca used for intercommunity communication within various Belgian linguistic groups, which is not true; he says "Chinese" in every context, instead of differentiating between the different Chinese languages—even specifying Mandarin or Cantonese would be an improvement) and his lack of attention to detail to second- and third-world countries, specifically South African countries and indigenous communities worldwide (he also glossed over Canada, which seems odd, particularly coming from a French-English translator!).
Overall I found this to be an interesting and fairly decent introduction into the field of translation studies, particularly for a non-specialist, although the lack of acknowledgement of the political nuance inherent in translation was a huge letdown. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Bellos's background as a white Western (British native) man negatively influenced this book, but it certainly didn't help the apparent lack of self-awareness.
I had complicated feelings with this one. An issue I've had with David Bellos's writing in our previous encounters is that he often doesn't fully explore the ideas he posits, i.e., he starts off strong, but then either tapers off or falls into an unrelated digression. This was moderately amusing (and admittedly apt) when reading his work on Victor Hugo, but doesn't lend itself well to a book on translation studies. As Suzy Kassem said, "Never trust the translation or interpretation of something without first trusting its interpreter."
Bellos, himself a professional translator of French to English, occupies a very privileged position within the loose-knit community. He does not delve into the political nature of translation, and in fact fails to discuss the implications of translation any further than the cool linguistic quirks that may pose problems for an individual translator. Translating a text is political, and not translating a text is as well. One pertinent example would be safety brochures that are only in British English and not native Indian languages; English was the sole language used for administrative purposes as well as in higher education until India's independence from Britain in 1947, at which point Indian legislators faced the challenge of choosing a language or languages for official communication as well as communication between different linguistic regions within the country, which has the world's fourth-highest number of distinct languages. The current official languages of the United Nations are Arabic, (Mandarin) Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish; official UN documents are made available in all of the above. There are currently 193 member countries of the United Nations. Do you see the problem?
To translate a text the translator must first decide what it means and its intention, in order to ensure that the text is translated consistently and appropriately. Any hint of non-literal phrasing complicates the situation tenfold. As an example, take this line, from "The Lion King":
Our teeth and ambitions are bared—be prepared!This is a zeugma; bared can refer to the idiom "to bare one's teeth," i.e., to display an angry, violent, or threatening reaction to or against something or someone, as an animal would when threatened—it could also refer to the phrase, "to lay bare," i.e., to reveal or uncover private information or feelings. The ambitions are laid bare, i.e., revealed; the teeth are bared, i.e., exposed: there is both a literal and metaphorical meaning. How could you translate this? What about into a language that doesn't have that same idiom? Umberto Eco posed a similar example: how do you translate the idiom "I smell a rat" from English into Italian, when the latter doesn't have a similar rodentine euphemism for a traitorous person?
There are multiple "correct" options, of course; in an instance which uses non-literal language, to translate indirectly—as would be necessary—would be to translate incorrectly; or, perhaps, incompletely. There are other, simpler, examples: the French word for "stranger" and "foreigner" are the same (étranger); English doesn't distinguish between visiting a place and visiting a person; Mandarin Chinese doesn't conjugate or pluralise; Russian doesn't have articles while other languages do; and so on. Author and translator Michael Coulson described translation as a difficult and thankless task, noting that "in the end there are no degrees of success, only degrees of failure," and I'm inclined to agree. An exact translation is possible only within the context of mathematics and the like, i.e., "two and two make four," "deux et deux font quatre"; outside of this, everything is an approximation at best. There is no such thing as a truly perfect, ideal, or "correct" translation.
Other minor quibbles I had with Bellos's approach include his tendency towards overstatement and generalisation (i.e., he says that English is the only lingua franca used for intercommunity communication within various Belgian linguistic groups, which is not true; he says "Chinese" in every context, instead of differentiating between the different Chinese languages—even specifying Mandarin or Cantonese would be an improvement) and his lack of attention to detail to second- and third-world countries, specifically South African countries and indigenous communities worldwide (he also glossed over Canada, which seems odd, particularly coming from a French-English translator!).
Nonsense can be made to make sense by supposing some alternative context for it. At the start of his revolutionary work Syntactic Structures (1957), Noam Chomsky cooked up a nonsense sentence in order to explain what he saw as the fundamental difference between a meaningful sentence and a grammatical one. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” was proposed as a fully grammatical sentence that had no possible meaning at all. [...] Within a few months, witty students devised ways of proving Chomsky wrong, and at Stanford they were soon running competitions for texts in which “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” would be not just a grammatical sentence, but a meaningful expression as well. Here’s one of the prize-winning entries:A part I did enjoy was when Bellos discussed how machine translation works. It's considered gauche in real-life translation to use a pivot language (i.e., a lingua franca, such as translating from Igbo to Mongolian by translating Igbo to English to Mongolian), but that's unfortunately how machine learning works: the neural network will search through established translated documents for a fragment of the given text (i.e., "Two houses, both alike in dignity..."); it would be more likely to find an example of English-Igbo translation as well as English-Mongolian, therefore an equivalent can be found for Igbo-Mongolian. Popular fiction and legal documentation are common suspects; "two houses" could be drawn from a real estate deed, for example. As anyone who's messed around with online machine translators is well aware, this method doesn't work perfectly, because machines are no substitute for human brains! Machines don't understand context. One humourous anecdote from my own experience was when one of my French students clearly used Google Translate on a homework assignment: the sentence was supposed to say, "I was wearing shorts" (the article of clothing), but the machine translator grabbed the translation of "shorts" (as in, short films) instead.It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
Overall I found this to be an interesting and fairly decent introduction into the field of translation studies, particularly for a non-specialist, although the lack of acknowledgement of the political nuance inherent in translation was a huge letdown. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Bellos's background as a white Western (British native) man negatively influenced this book, but it certainly didn't help the apparent lack of self-awareness.