A Matter Of Translation

I remember my translation teachers, back when I was at uni, repeating that when you translate a text, a sentence, – anything! – you can’t always translate literally and therefore you have to make choices, and choose a point of view. This got me thinking quite a lot to be honest; and sometimes I still find myself thinking about it. Like now.

I think I only really realised what those choices involve when I went through my phase of re-watching all the Disney films that I used to like (and know like the back of my hand) in English.

What happened there is that I got almost immediately struck by the fact that what I (as a French person) was seeing and getting out of these films wasn’t universally shared by the viewers of those same films throughout the world. Let me explain: put aside my personal tastes in terms of stories, whether I identify with the heroes or not, and what I understand overall from what is going on in the film (moral values, life lessons, etc.), what is left? I can’t sing along because I don’t know what the lyrics are in English. It sucks a bit of the fun out, okay, but what else? Well, this is where it gets interesting: what the characters say and sing is sometimes slightly different in the different languages (even if here I am focusing more specifically on French and English). Of course, it comes from the fact that the people who translated the lyrics and the dialogue for dubbing had to make some choices and that they couldn’t always transcribe again absolutely all the meaning. These little differences end up in French and English-speaking children not seeing exactly the same film. It might not make much sense to our English-speaking audience who might not have had to watch a (sometimes terribly) dubbed version of a film, and for this I apologise. As a way of comparison, it is pretty much like watching a film when you’re young and watching that film again some time when you’re a grown-up and getting the subtle or salacious jokes that you weren’t getting when you were younger. It is about getting to a whole new level of the film. So you can understand some things slightly differently when you watch, say The Lion King in French and in English. Fine. Does the same thing happen in other aspects of our lives?

The answer to that question is “yes”.

Let’s leave Disney for now and take another example: the for Dummies books. Those books have been translated to several languages and here again I would like to compare the French and English versions. If they needed to, the for Dummies books could possibly be re-named ‘for Idiots’; although it is never nice to be called an ‘idiot’ (especially by someone else) I could picture myself calling myself an idiot in a situation where it is obvious that I haven’t done the right thing. Plus I feel that depending on the context the word ‘idiot’ can be a synonym of (and less negative than) ‘ignorant’ in some ways. This being said, let’s take a look at the French title for this series of books: ‘--- pour les Nuls’, literally ‘--- for Losers’; yes: ‘losers’. Now say I want to learn to play the guitar; both the English and the French books are going to be on the same subject, and the French version is very likely to be nothing more than a translation of the English text. However, will I feel like buying the French version of the book? I mean, there is a big gap between being a ‘dummy’ and a ‘loser’. In the first case the title suggests that I still have lots to learn whereas in the second case it kind of suggests that I am pretty much hopeless and that if I don’t get what is in the book I can just go hang myself. In addition to that, in the eventuality of me buying this book in a French shop, what will the people around me think of me? Or what will my friends think of me when they have a look at my bookshelf? I don’t really want people to think that I am a loser! Worse: it is hard and derogatory to think of myself as a failure when all I wanted was to learn to play the guitar.

These are only but two examples of how when something is translated (no matter what it is) the choices that are made are likely to affect the way we receive, process and ‘digest’ the information, and of how likely it is that the translation will have a different impact not only on the individuals sharing a same language, but also across languages (e.g.: the for Dummies books sound funny in English but imply that you are a failure if you read them in French).