CROSSCULTURAL TRANSLATION IS TRANSCREATION: Malathi Nidadavolu (Note: The following article is based on my observations resulting from my translation of Telugu stories into English for over twenty years now. Some of my views may be unorthodox but they are working for me. The statistics show that 350-450 readers per week are visiting my site, even towards the end of a quarter. There are questions however regarding my translation practices. Therefore, I thought it is appropriate I share my views, my experiences and the underlying philosophy with you. --MN) * One of the major realizations for me in the past six years is translating for readers from other cultures. I do not mean the differences within India such as Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil and Kannada. Each of these languages do have their own specific customs and beliefs yet carry a commonality as well. Secondly, the differences between various kinds (dialects?) of English such as American, British, Indian, Canadian, and Australian requiring special study. A translator usually works within the bounds of three areas—the target audience, the language he is familiar with, and capable of using it effectively and comfortably, and, thirdly, interpretation of one culture to another. In that sense, a translator is not just a mechanic rendering words from one language to another but a writer also. The translation is one more creative product. Crossing the cultural bounds: Mark Twain has a great story—a story behind one of his stories—which illustrates the woes of transcultural translation in an amusing way. The story goes like this: A French writer once published an article entitled “These Humorists Americans,” in which he analyzed the wit and humor of two American writers. Mark Twain was one of them. The French writer also included his translation of “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain, apparently without his knowledge or consent. Eventually Mark Twain heard about it. He was pleased with the French writer’s praise but not with his translation. The translation annoyed Mark Twain to the point he decided to retranslate the French version into English. In his comments preceding his retranslation, he said, “I had been at infinite pains and trouble to retranslate this French version back into English.” I, being illiterate in French, read only the two English versions, which made me wonder if Mark Twain’s humor also had emerged at some point, and if his retranslation was his way of making a mockery of transcultural translations. Probably he had enjoyed a private joke of his own in the process..For further information, click here. Limitations imposed by cultural bounds: My point is it is a lot easier to point out the apparent slants or blunders in a translation than capture the entire spirit of the original and the indigenous tones across the cultural bounds. Eminent scholars offer blanket suggestions like “Work closely with the author” and “You must be well-read in the linguistic, literary and cultural peculiarities of both the languages”, yet there is very little guidance when it comes down to the finer points of the actual work and even fewer guidelines to translate stories transculturally. I stress this last statement since the comments I have been receiving suggest that the readers are ignoring the difference between pan-Indian translations (from one Indian language to another Indian language) and the translations intended for others whose cultures and mode of comprehension are markedly different from ours. I got the same impression from the translations I have been receiving for publication on my site. Why do people read stories from other cultures: Let us first explore the motivation why people from one culture would like to read stories from another culture. In my younger days, in the fifties and sixties, European novels such as A Tale of Two, Cities translated by Vidwan Viswam, Hunchback of Notre Dam, translated by Surampudi Sitaram, and others gained enormous reputation and made us devoted readers of fiction. Part of the reason for their popularity was the spirit of the times triggered by the education movement, I suppose. It could also be because the Telugu renderings by those translators were superb. The translations read as if they were Telugu originals. If there were discussions on these translations based on some accepted literary criteria, I was not aware of them. I just enjoyed them for their story and readability value. Now, after living more than three decades in America and talking with my American friends, I have come to understand that people read translations of fiction from other cultures to learn about the cultural similarities and dissimilarities. They would like to know about others' lifestyles, beliefs, customs, and life’s vicissitudes. In general, the entire range of fiction can be narrowed down to about one dozen story lines. The customs, habits, and lifestyles mark the variations from one culture to another. To me, a simplistic and maybe naive, assumption is that the two pivotal topics for all the stories is either power or pleasure, which in turn revolves around woman or money. No story has been credited with distinction if it were not about one of these two topics, not to my knowledge at least. In other words, it is not just the crisis or the condition but people’s reaction to the crisis that captures readers’ curiosity. People would like to know how the others resolved their issues or reacted in a given predicament in their cultures. On a different note, I must add that this kind of reading requires one more discipline on the part of the readers—willingness to step outside their preconditioned notions and transport themselves mentally into the environment of the story on hand. What happens when you read a story and to retell the same story to another? Even within the same culture, no two people speak the same words to express the same notion or thought. For instance, you tell a joke or a story to your friends and then ask them to repeat the story back to you in the same language you have used. You will notice that not one of them repeated the story in the same words you had narrated. That is the part of processing in one’s mind, the literary DNA of an individual if you will. A person heard your story, internalized it in the words he had known, and rendered it back to you in his own language. Same thing happens when a person translates a story. It passes through several stages. First, the translator as a reader reads the story and processes it in his mind, reformulates it into a version per his own diction, and then into the target language. After that, he positions himself as a translator, and starts rethinking how well he can narrate it to the target audience, wary of the diction, the idiom and the sophistication of the target audience. Several factors come into play when one translates a story for readers beyond their cultural bounds. Factors like dialectal variations, idioms, proverbs, cultural peculiarities, and an individual reader/translator’s own idiom and his understanding of the story, which may or may not be the same as that of the author-- they all become crucial for an effective translation. Working with the author of the original text: In working with the author of the original, the two important questions to deal with are the message and the language. Let us first start with the message. As we all are aware, when a person reads a story, his own experiences and perceptions overlie his understanding of the story consciously or unconsciously. The translator conveys what he understands to be the message. Possibly that is also the reason he has selected the story to translate in the first place. This may or may not be the same as the author’s message. In the latter case, it creates a conflict between the original author and the translator. I got into this kind of situation at least once. The author, well-versed in English and Telugu, suggested changes I was not comfortable with. The situations raised several questions for me. I had to ask myself whether I should go along with the author and agree to read a message that was not evident to me in the story? Is it possible that the author failed to convey the message he thought he did? What is my duty when the author suggests phraseology that is not mine? When the author is a scholar in his own right, and insists on a scholarly rendering, am I obliged to follow the author’s instructions and publish the translation as mine with the all the restatements of the original author? Should I ignore the linguistic peculiarities of the target audience to humor the original author? In my mind, that is not permissible. I believe that the translation must include only my perceptions and my language in order to justify attaching my name to the final product. Similar conflict may also arise from the differences in the author’s language and the language of the target audience. Additional complications arise from the authors thinking in their native language and wanting to apply the principles in accordance with their own sophistication. Technically variations in language such as pedantic and casual are dictated by the original text. For instance, Viswanatha Satyanarayana’s style is pedantic while many of the latter writers are using the language appropriate for the characters.I mean an illiterate and a literate speak two different styles within the same dialect such as Telangana or Coastal Andhra. On a different level, the translator may choose to use the pedantic style based on his own sophistication. I noticed the latter to be the case in translations I have been receiving from Andhra Pradesh. I prefer to make adjustments based the target audience. In practice, I submit my translation to the authors, and often the author will have one or two suggestions. For example, vankaaya is brinjal in Andhra and eggplant in America. A chetikarra is cane in America but I have noticed some writers using "handstick" as the corresponding English term. Which term is correct depends on who we are writing for. Sometimes their suggestions are acceptable to me and sometimes they are not. If not, I will contact the writer again and we come to an agreement. On rare occasions, we do not agree and then I will drop the work. In the past six years, I have translated close to eighty stories from Telugu into English. I am not always certain of the way it turns out. I keep changing the wording until I am hopelessly confused or dispirited; and, unable to decide on the “perfect” version anymore. Eventually, I became aware of various styles not only in the stories written by different writers but also the regional, vocation-specific terminology, and the character portrayal in a given story. Clearly all these variations are not translatable. The regional peculiarities such as Telangana, Rayalaseema or Coastal Andhra dialects do not lend themselves to translation into English. Nevertheless, the difference between the pedantic and the colloquial styles can be expounded with a reasonable accuracy. We can see the differences in the styles of traditionalists like Viswanatha Satyanarayana, Utukuri Lakshmikanthama, and Acchamamba on one hand, and the modern writers like Madhurantakam Rajaram, Chaganti Somayajulu and all those writers of eminence in the fifties and sixties on the other. Most of the Telugu women writers in the fifties and sixties have written successfully in casual/colloquial style with unusual flair. In recent times, the use of English in Telugu stories has taken a prominent place. However, there is a difference in the use of English by the writers of previous generations and the current writers. Probably, it started in the forties when the British English was gaining prominence in fiction. In the forties, I think, Mokkapati Narasimha Sastry used English for satire and ridicule in his “Barrister Parvateesam”, a fictional account of a Telugu young man traveling to England. In the fifties, Racakonda Viswanatha Sastry used English for humor remarkably. I vaguely remember one instance where the narrator comments, “The judge was having the time of his life.” The context was a court scene where the plaintiff was using abusive language toward the female defendant. The judge had similar grudge against his wife but would not dare call her names. Therefore, it gave him great satisfaction to hear the abusive language and he "was having the time of his life." In effect, the author used it to comment on the judge's character. Several Telugu writers used English to mark a change in tone or humor. It was a way of drawing the reader’s attention to a point or advising them of the shift in the narrator’s tone. From translator’s point of view, this creates an additional problem. An English phrase translated into English means just rewriting it in English; it loses its edge as satire, and fails to carry the same connotation. Once again, the translator has to make some kind of adjustment to imply the original author’s intent. Coming back to commonly accepted styles such as pedantic and casual, I believe that translation is achievable to a reasonable extent. One such example is the difference in my translations of “The Soul Wills It” (Viswanatha Satyanarayana) as opposed to the translation of “Radha’s debt.” (Mullapudi Venkatarmana.) First story was written in formal Telugu while the second story was in colloquial style. In addition, the second story included wordplay profusely. I tried to bring about these differences in my translations of the two stories. I found it easier to stay with the formal style compared to keeping up with the colloquialisms and malapropisms in the second. That is one of the problems in translation. Indian English vs. American English: The dialectal variations in a given language require similar, if not the same, variation in translation in order to highlight the differences and to maintain the linguistic integrity of the original. At times the author may suggest a stylistic variant he is comfortable with but I am not. For instance, if the original text in Telugu is in pedantic style, similar elitist language in translation is justified. On the other hand, if the Telugu story is in colloquial style, and the author, being a learned scholar in English, suggests wording he is used to, I tend to disagree. This happens partly because of the suggestions the Telugu writers make based on their English language skills, which are very different from mine. I am not implying American English is superior to Indian English. My comments are limited to the present context. I am living in the United States for over three decades and American English has grown on me. Currently, I am running this site from America and in that, I am beginning to be more comfortable with the language I am familiar. Ironically, I had started out with Indian English as a student of late Professor K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, an eminent scholar and proponent of Indian English. In addition, I began noticing these finer distinctions as I continued to translate stories by different writers with markedly different styles. Probably, I would not have noticed it if I stayed with only one writer and with one type of writing such as traditional or colloquial. This also brings us to another point, which is how much of the original culture-specific terminology can be kept as is. Some translators suggest leave it to the reader to infer the meaning from the context. That is feasible within pan-Indian context, I guess. Each state—Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, and so on—has its own specific culture; yet there is also a common underlying thread, which makes it viable for the readers to infer meanings. One good example is the multifarious intricacies of the hierarchy in Indian homes. A simple conversation between a mother and her child or a husband and his wife invokes a reasonably accurate image in the reader’s mind regardless from which language it was translated. Recently I received a translation where the original in Telugu included pronouns like aayana, vaaDu, and thanu (I did not see the original, and so I am guessing) to refer to different characters in the story, and all these pronouns translated into one 'he'. You can imagine the confusion when the lines read like "He asked him to bring coffee. He brought coffee. He drank coffee and left." My point is a foreigner will not be able to envisage the conversation without an explanation of the nature of their relationship and some physical description. That does not mean we must make a textbook case of it. My philosophy is translator has an obligation to make the story as lucid as possible without hurting the integrity. It is translator's responsibility to maintain a smooth flow of the text and clarity. For that purpose, some details regarding the cultural nuance are also in order. It does not hurt to provide a footnote or annotation and let the reader opt to read or skip the additional information. In other words, the target audience plays a crucial role in my decisions in terms of how much we can leave for the readers to comprehend on their own. Against this background, let me explain how and why I translated the idiom and cultural nuance the way I did. Here are a few of my arguments and examples. Linguistic peculiarities which are untranslatable: Under this category, the first thing that comes to my mind is the pronouns. For instance, pronouns, meeru and nuvvu translate as only one word, “you” in English. There is no distinction of formal and informal, singular and plural. Similarly, we will have to translate various forms of imperatives of the verb vacchu—raa, raaraa, raave, and ranDi into one word “Come”. There are also more casual forms of the same verb, daa, daave, daaraa (there is no dandDi). In English, all these forms translate into the same phrase, “Come” This is one of the simplest examples. For the purpose of this article, we can classify Telugu phrases into three categories: 1. Phrases that allow straight translation; 2. Phrases and idioms, which can be translated with a little stretch; and 3. Phrases and idioms, which require considerable effort for making them comprehensible to foreign audience. In the latter two instances, the question is to what degree we can make the necessary changes in the original. How do we find a meaningful phrase or sentence, which captures the reader’s attention and also conveys the cultural nuance? Second question is whether we should use the English equivalents wherever available or translate the Telugu phrases to highlight the Telugu nuance and provide the English equivalents in a footnote. Different translators have different opinions on this subject. I am not enunciating a theory but giving what has been my practice and why. One thing I have learned over the years is that there is always room for a different rendering. Let us first examine the first category—the phrases that afford straightforward translations, enabling the reader to see the parallels between the two cultures. For instance, pustakappurugu is “bookworm”, “turning a deaf ear” is comparable to chevini vEsukokapovaDam. The phrase, mannu tinna paamulaa can be translated as “like a snake snacked on dirt”. There is no ambiguity in these translations. The last phrase may require some knowledge of snake culture but that is the same for all readers regardless of their cultural background. The proverb, poriginTi pullakuura ruchi can be translated as “the greens from the neighbor’s garden taste better”. This is similar to “the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.” In my translation, I did not exactly translate the word pullakuura, assuming the specific term in Telugu is used only for alliteration, and does not contribute much to the spirit of the proverb. 2. Then there are phrases that can be left as is or translated partially. The phrase, Kondaveeti chentaadu is one such phrase. I translated it as Kondaveeti rope (A Triangle. www.thulika.net, January 2007), which is a partial translation. My reasoning was it referred to the topography of the area in Guntur district, where water is scarce and the wells are very deep. For people in Kondaveedu, drawing water from those wells is a long and laborious task. Implicitly, a task compared to konDaveeTi rope is long and laborious. I thought, by translating only the translatable part, chentaaDu as rope, a foreign reader would have a better motivation to learn more about the implicit meaning. If I were to leave the entire phrase as KondaveeTi chaantaaDu, the reader would have no idea of the connotation; he would skip the phrase and move on to the next line. Did the reader miss by doing so? I would say yes, if his purpose were to learn something about the other culture from the story. If not, he has the option to skip the phrase and move on. It is a judgment call. Different renderings cater to the expectations of different audience. 3. Then we have phrases and idioms that are almost untranslatable. Just translating them alone would note suffice to communicate the spirit of the original to the foreign audience. Two languages of two diametrically opposite cultures do not lend themselves to accurate translation one hundred percent. Culture-specific idioms belong in this category. Let us take an idiom or phrase such as vivaraalu raasi chavaDem, vedhava. Probably the term vedhava can be translated as “idiot”. That is not a literal translation since idiocy refers to the intellectual faculty, while the term in this case is referring to his irresponsible conduct. That is my interpretation at least. More importantly, how do we render raasi chaavaDem in English? “Why can’t the idiot write the details and die?” certainly sounds odd. If we have to keep the verb, chaavaDem, the translation probably would read like, “He’s given no details, like it would kill him or something.” I am not saying this is correct or it has to be this way only. This once again is a judgment call for the translator. Another example is lempalesukonu (Bhanumati. attaakoDaleeyam. www.thulika.net. April 2006.). The phrase lempalesukonu is culture-specific. No matter how we translate it, a foreign reader cannot visualize the scene without a brief explanation. I translated it as “She tapped on her cheeks lightly and reverently.” One young writer asked me why I could not use the word “slap”. From what I know, lempakaaya icchu in Telugu means slapping. The phrase implies slapping somebody else and in anger. On the other hand, lempalesukonu is with reference to oneself, and with reference to a specific socio- religious practice. In that practice, one taps on one’s own cheeks only lightly and to express remorse. For a reader who is not familiar with this practice, “slapping” gives a completely different impression. This is not one of the instances where we can leave it to the reader to understand from the context. The phrase does not invoke the same kind of image in the minds of foreign readers as our Indian counterparts. Proverbs: Proverbs or adages are time-honored, time-tested facts. They are the props, which come in handy when our language fails. There is a proverb for everybody and for every occasion. As the saying goes, even the devil can quote scriptures. Proverbs include a rhyme or an alliteration in order either to capture one’s attention or as a mnemonic device. This is one angle the translator must remember while translating proverbs. When I translate, I try to bring about similar effect in English. That explains some of the digression from the original in my translations of Telugu proverbs. The following examples illustrate my point. I would translate mundu nuyyi, venaka goyyi as “a well in front and a trench the rear”. Corresponding English proverb is “Between a rock and a hard place”. I still would give the translation of the Telugu phrase instead of using the English proverb, in order to highlight the commonalities in different cultures and perhaps the topography. Here are a few other examples, culture-specific in terms of beliefs and lifestyles: 1. vaana raakaDa, praaNa pokaDa - Nobody can predict when it rains or a person dies. It is a centuries-old belief that death and weather are unpredictable. I am sure modern science tells us different. All the same, the proverb is being used to refer to unpredictable situations. 2. kaDupu cincukunTe kaaLLameeda paDutundi – If you tear your guts, they drop on your feet. In Telugu, the subject is not stated but the verb cinchukonu implies “one’s own”. I supplied ‘you’ in the conditional clause and ‘they’ [the guts] in the second part. Once again, the translation does not impart the implied meaning—“you hurt your children and it hurts you too,” the pain is much closer to home than you might think. 3. kaTTelammina choTa puvvulamminaTTu: Like selling firewood where you used to sell flowers. The translation does not convey the idea of downgrading lifestyle unless stated. I also inserted ‘you’ for smoother flow of the line. In the original line, the subject is not stated, an example of the linguistic peculiarities. 4. gati leni manushulu taguvukeDite matileni peddalu teerchevaaraa ani. Kalipatnam Rama Rao. yajnam) “Like hapless men seeking justice from brainless men” ("The Rite of Sacrifice" From my Front Porch. In press). Here again, I tried to coin a new adage based on the original text loosely. Now let us look at some of the proverbs or phrases that are not translatable. aDugulaku maDugulottaDam which carries a much heavier cultural nuance. I am not one hundred percent sure but I think the word maDugulu refers to madatalu (cloth foldings). My guess is the phrase refers to unfolding and spreading a sheet for a person to walk, as a mark of respect. The closest English phrase would be spreading red carpet. However, I would not use the word “red carpet”. Foreign audience would miss the native idiom if I do so. Distinctive, culture-specific phraseology Even more distinctively culture-specific phraseology requires more than just the use of a dictionary to translate. For instance, manchimaaTa chesuku vacchaanu (Malladi Ramakrishna Sastry. soham. www.thulika.net. June 2003) does not mean making a “good word”—an odd phrase— nor making a good conversation. The phrase refers to an old custom called pooTa kuuLla illu, where homeowners serve food for money in an informal setting. The phrase, manchimaaTa chesukuvacchu has come to mean making food arrangements. Another example is vaaraalu chesukonu, also refers to an old custom. It means not “making weeks” but to have a specific kind of food arrangement with a few families. Another phrase I have come across is aboru dakku. I do not know the etymology of aboru but I know the phrase carries the same meaning as paruvu dakku, to save one’s face or rescue one’s social status. I translated sodi manishi as village psychic. A reputable Telugu writer asked me if that was the correct translation. To be frank, I do not know. My logic at the time was when two cultures do not have the same practice or vocation or lifestyle, we need to come up with terminology based on comparable practices. A psychic invokes spirits to predict future events; the sodi woman invokes goddesses for the same purpose. The spirits and the goddesses may not be the same but both are unverifiable sources. In that sense, I thought sodi woman could be referred to as a psychic or fortuneteller. I chose psychic since it rolled easier on my tongue when I uttered the two words aloud. I also provided further explanation of the sodi tradition for the same reason, that is, to emphasize that the two terms are not exactly the same. Probably people of my generation have heard the phrase, pulusulo mukka, meaning not to be taken seriously. We used it when we included a little child in a game, where we pretended that he was a participant without actually making him one. Can anybody tell me if it is still in use? Concepts peculiar to Telugu culture such as englili, maDi kaTTukonu, dishTi tagulu are possibly understood by readers across India but not by westerners. I know there are some readers/writers who would say it does not matter. I have no answer for them. I just do not feel that way. To sum up, I do not believe that one can dictate the right way to translate a particular phrase or insist that there is one and only way. The translator is also a writer and he must have the freedom to present a story in a language with which he is comfortable. If the author disagrees, or feels strongly about it, as the adage goes, there is no meeting of the minds, and no translation. On a slightly different note, I would like add that the newly coined proverbs and untranslatable concepts written in English may gain currency over time and when used repeatedly by the English-speaking people of Telugu heritage. It has to be a collective effort. It is even conceivable to develop a database of these newly coined phrases for posterity. (end) |