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!
Lip service (October 2020)
For this month’s blog post, I have found a last translation example from Monica Ali’s “Letter from Uganda”, published in The Guardian on 15 October 2006. After vividly describing the makeshift facilities of a refugee camp, she points at the reason for such camps: the atrocities committed by the LRA, Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army. Ali also writes about the local efforts to try to achieve peace through reconciliation. In this context, the situation of prisons in the UK springs to her mind: “I think about our prisons, bursting at the seams, the lip service we pay to rehabilitation.”
This was translated into German: “Ich denke über unsere Gefängnisse in Großbritannien nach, die aus allen Nähten platzen. Sie stellen das Lippenbekenntnis dar, das wir zur Resozialisierung ablegen.” The translation reads smoothly; still, something is wrong, here.
At a closer look, I notice that I do not quite understand the meaning of the German text. If prisons are the lip service we pay to rehabilitation, then the prison itself would be the rehabilitation measure – which makes no sense. Rehabilitation comes after a spell in prison. The lip service refers to the insufficient implementation of promised rehabilitation measures. So, what exactly is wrong with the translation?
To cut a long story short: the translator misinterpreted the syntax of the source sentence. Her interpretation is possible but makes little sense. Here, “the lip service we pay to rehabilitation” is regarded as being in apposition to “our prisons”, whereas, in the original, the phrase doubles as a second syntactic object: I think about our prisons [...] and about the lip service we pay to rehabilitation. Thus, the sentence is about two things that are related but different.
My suggestion for a translation would be: Ich denke über unsere Gefängnisse in Großbritannien nach, die aus allen Nähten platzen, und darüber, dass wir zur Resozialisierung der Gefangenen nichts als Lippenbekenntnisse zu bieten haben.