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David Bellos is an English translator who has gained fame for his translations of French-language literature, such as Georges Perec and Ismail Kadare. His involvement of many decades in literary translation has led him to think long and hard on matters of translation, and in this book he aims to share all these musings with a general audience.
Thus, Bellos talks about what “translation” is exactly – some languages, such as Japanese, have no one single term that corresponds to the English word, but rather they consider more specific cases while English-speakers assume that there exists an abstract covering them all. He looks at the debate about whether translation can ever be a true reflection of the original. Different translation approaches are illustrated by examples from literary translation, as well as from missionaries’ translations of the Bible into languages very different from European ones in terms of semantics and cultural context. He comments on the phenomenon by which so much is translated out of English but so little into it, and how English has covertly influenced the literary styles of today’s European languages.
I am trained in linguistics and I have worked in the translation industry, so I assumed that this book would be right up my alley. However, I was not particularly impressed about it. Firstly, Bellos can be very long-winded, and one wonders if he felt he had to bloat his manuscript so that it could be published as a standalone book. Secondly, to a large extent this book is just a repackaging of other pop-sci publications on language and translation, and I kept having the impression that I had read all this before.
Thus, Bellos talks about what “translation” is exactly – some languages, such as Japanese, have no one single term that corresponds to the English word, but rather they consider more specific cases while English-speakers assume that there exists an abstract covering them all. He looks at the debate about whether translation can ever be a true reflection of the original. Different translation approaches are illustrated by examples from literary translation, as well as from missionaries’ translations of the Bible into languages very different from European ones in terms of semantics and cultural context. He comments on the phenomenon by which so much is translated out of English but so little into it, and how English has covertly influenced the literary styles of today’s European languages.
I am trained in linguistics and I have worked in the translation industry, so I assumed that this book would be right up my alley. However, I was not particularly impressed about it. Firstly, Bellos can be very long-winded, and one wonders if he felt he had to bloat his manuscript so that it could be published as a standalone book. Secondly, to a large extent this book is just a repackaging of other pop-sci publications on language and translation, and I kept having the impression that I had read all this before.