It occurs to me...
Jan. 1st, 2013 03:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpGalina and I made a show—for the dogs and cats, naturally—of our "first hug" of the New Year. Then I set about the serious business of making the first batch of yogurt for the year (more time-consuming than complicated), after which I returned to my office to continue work.
With the memory of that "first hug" fresh in my mind, it occurred to me to start, perhaps, my own personal meme, of "the last sentence translated on the Old Year," to wit:
* * * In other news, it turns out my OED (CD version 2.0) will not work under Windows 8. I could theoretically buy an upgrade to the latest version (for about $70 from Amazon), but to be frank, I've turned almost exclusively to the Web for definitions of not just Russian, but English words as well.
My interest in the OED had been tickled by my desire to use a form of "to hold one's peace/piece" in the current translation. I had pretty much gone through most of my life under the impression that the idiom was "to hold one's peace" until an incident a couple of years ago, when an editor changed "peace" to "piece." I recall my eyes glazing over, slightly, at the time, but as I am not generally inclined to argue with editors, I simply stored the change in the back of what passes for my mind, and pressed onward.
Turning to Google first, I ran across a curious view of the "peace/piece" issue in the phrase that starts with "forever hold your..." (fairly old, at Yahoo! Answers). What I found curious was in the "Best Answer," which states "I knew it was peace because the other is silly," and then purports to provide evidence in the form of a quote from the "Weddings" board at about.com (me, I'd grant Wikipedia more credibility).
The OED that runs on my old Windows 7 computer has the following two items under "piece":
* * * Apropos of editors, there are good reasons to not argue with editorial changes. Such changes may, as in the case above, be justified. If they are not, then anyone who calls you on the carpet for what turn out to be bad edits can usually be mollified by having them look at your words. From a more practical, quotidian perspective (as I've mentioned in earlier posts), translators who routinely argue about changes made to their work tend to soon be overlooked in favor of translators who don't, and translators who routinely don't argue about edits tend to be listened to a tad more attentively on those rare occasions when they do object.
That said, one of my professional resolutions for the year is to more energetically fight the habit I developed, early in my career, of self-censoring my translations in favor of more literal renderings, which was brought home to me in some comments that were made, by a private reviewer, of my translation of Alexander Sokolenko's memoir Keep Forever (link to Kindle version).
This habit developed as a way of avoiding one kind of editorial criticism that is generally irrefutable: "That's not what it says!" And while you may argue that a translation that does not reflect what is said is indeed a poor translation, I would counter by paraphrasing a former U.S. President, and content that it depends on what is meant by "it says." For any time one deviates from a literal rendering is to deviate from what "it says." Sometimes that's important; other times, it isn't (and, in fact, to not deviate might raise unnecessary questions in the reader's mind).
A case in point is the translation of end-of-year holiday greetings from Russia, which—rendered more or less literally—is: "Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!"
If you've been born and bred in the Anglophone world, that just doesn't sound right. It should be the other way around, no?
Well, it turns out the reason for the holidays being cited in reverse of what is customary in the Anglophone tradition is because the Russian Orthodox Church hews to the pre-Gregorian, "Old Style" calendar, which places December 25 (Old Style) squarely on January 7 (New Style), after the New Year. This is perhaps an interesting bit of trivia, but doesn't cure the fact that in English, "Happy New Year and Merry Christmas" sounds funny.
So would a translation that reads "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year" be wrong?
"But that's not what it says!"
To which I say, "Bah, humbug!"
...and back to the face of the mine I go!
Cheers...
With the memory of that "first hug" fresh in my mind, it occurred to me to start, perhaps, my own personal meme, of "the last sentence translated on the Old Year," to wit:
The only question is what educational points should be emphasized at what age, and will our desire to aid in the child's development always actually be a help and not a hindrance?and "the first sentence translated in the New Year":
And how is one to show the enthusiastic educator the risks and dangers of his or her selected path?On the one hand, it's not very revelatory; on the other, I've seen things that make less sense on LJ.
My interest in the OED had been tickled by my desire to use a form of "to hold one's peace/piece" in the current translation. I had pretty much gone through most of my life under the impression that the idiom was "to hold one's peace" until an incident a couple of years ago, when an editor changed "peace" to "piece." I recall my eyes glazing over, slightly, at the time, but as I am not generally inclined to argue with editors, I simply stored the change in the back of what passes for my mind, and pressed onward.
Turning to Google first, I ran across a curious view of the "peace/piece" issue in the phrase that starts with "forever hold your..." (fairly old, at Yahoo! Answers). What I found curious was in the "Best Answer," which states "I knew it was peace because the other is silly," and then purports to provide evidence in the form of a quote from the "Weddings" board at about.com (me, I'd grant Wikipedia more credibility).
The OED that runs on my old Windows 7 computer has the following two items under "piece":
So it would appear that "to hold one's piece" might not be so silly, after all.
2.d. a piece of one's mind: something of what one thinks; one's candid opinion; a rebuke, scolding
17.g. to say (or speak) one's piece: to express one's opinion or judgement on a subject or question; to have one's say.
That said, one of my professional resolutions for the year is to more energetically fight the habit I developed, early in my career, of self-censoring my translations in favor of more literal renderings, which was brought home to me in some comments that were made, by a private reviewer, of my translation of Alexander Sokolenko's memoir Keep Forever (link to Kindle version).
This habit developed as a way of avoiding one kind of editorial criticism that is generally irrefutable: "That's not what it says!" And while you may argue that a translation that does not reflect what is said is indeed a poor translation, I would counter by paraphrasing a former U.S. President, and content that it depends on what is meant by "it says." For any time one deviates from a literal rendering is to deviate from what "it says." Sometimes that's important; other times, it isn't (and, in fact, to not deviate might raise unnecessary questions in the reader's mind).
A case in point is the translation of end-of-year holiday greetings from Russia, which—rendered more or less literally—is: "Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!"
If you've been born and bred in the Anglophone world, that just doesn't sound right. It should be the other way around, no?
Well, it turns out the reason for the holidays being cited in reverse of what is customary in the Anglophone tradition is because the Russian Orthodox Church hews to the pre-Gregorian, "Old Style" calendar, which places December 25 (Old Style) squarely on January 7 (New Style), after the New Year. This is perhaps an interesting bit of trivia, but doesn't cure the fact that in English, "Happy New Year and Merry Christmas" sounds funny.
So would a translation that reads "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year" be wrong?
"But that's not what it says!"
To which I say, "Bah, humbug!"
...and back to the face of the mine I go!
Cheers...
