Like-Blog
Presenting you the most interesting translation solutions
Why Like-Blog? Now, first of all, this blog is a blog that you should like (and read regularly) – at least, if you are interested in translation. Then, the topic discussed here is one in which the meaningful likeness between a text and its translation in the language pair English-German plays a key role. On this page, I will take a close look at some interesting translation solutions that I have come across in the course of my work as a translator and translation scholar.
A translation solution is only as good as the arguments that support it. This means that any translation criticism, whether positive or negative, needs to be justified. The quality of a translation solution shows only when we compare it to other possible translation solutions in a given translation situation. Therefore, a translation critic should not only say why a translation solution is bad, but also demonstrate what a better solution might look like. I will try to stick to these principles of translation criticism. So if you have any questions regarding my line of argument or if you disagree, please, let me know your opinion by phone at +49 4171 6086525 or by e-mail to bittner@businessenglish-hamburg.de. So much for the introduction. I hope you’ll enjoy reading this blog!
Stylistically good and bad (September 2024)
“But those many who desire a transracial faith life have found themselves discouraged – subtly, often unintentionally, but remarkably consistently.”. This sentence has been taken from “Can Megachurches Bridge the Racial Divide?”, an article by David van Biema, published on time.com on 11 January 2010.
The translation goes: “Aber diejenigen, die gern ihren Glauben über Grenzen der Hautfarbe hinweg ausleben wollten, wurden entmutigt – subtil, meist unabsichtlich, aber auffallend beständig.”
Unlike many other of my blog posts, this one is not about finding a translation error in the target text. The example is remarkable because it reveals an interesting contrast between avoiding the pitfalls of translation and being trapped by them.
Let’s start with pitfall avoidance. The main part of the sentence up to the dash is not easily rendered into German. The translator, it is true, might follow the source text and translate, for example: Aber diejenigen, die sich nach einem transethnischen Glaubensleben sehnen, sahen sich entmutigt. However, this German rendering would require much more comprehension effort on the part of the reader than the English original. This is why the translator falls back on paraphrasing, which enables her to disentangle a semantically difficult source language pattern in such a way that the equivalent in the target language can be understood with similar ease. The solution “Aber diejenigen, die gern ihren Glauben über Grenzen der Hautfarbe hinweg ausleben wollten, wurden entmutigt” is much better than the version that follows the words of the source text.
Unfortunately, the above translation technique – which takes as a starting point the holistic understanding of a source text passage (rather than the individual words of that passage) and then (independently of the meanings of individual words) expresses the overall sense in the target language – is not used with regard to the consecutive adverbs “remarkably consistently”. As a result, we get the less idiomatic rendering “auffallend beständig”: the translator has been trapped by a pitfall that she had first managed to avoid. My suggestion for the part after the dash would be: ... subtil, meist unabsichtlich, aber eben immer wieder.