How do you translate plays on words? What about culturally-specific landmarks or expressions that may be unknown to a foreign audience? Should you translate names or leave them in the original language? Each of these questions and more make up the challenging work that confronts literary translators. For a translator working with literature, the question isn’t only what to say, it’s also how to say it. They must find the perfect way to express the original meaning without changing the sense of the text.
Plays on words and tongue twisters can prove especially difficult for translators. How, for example, would you translate “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers?” In this case you would find an equivalent expression in the target language that is just as well known and carries the same pronunciation challenges. More difficult, however, are riddles, rhymes, and idiomatic expressions. NO simple solutions exist, and it’s often down to translators to become creative and use a dictionary and thesaurus together with their knowledge of the target language to carefully convey as much of the original meaning as possible.
Trickier, however, are regional varieties of language and humor that use very specific cultural references that require an understanding of the time period, location, and people involved for the reference to make any sense. There’s probably no single area of literary translation more complicated than cultural references, in fact. In this case, it isn’t nearly as easy to simply find an equivalent expression, since the concept may be unknown in the target language. This may be seen in the Harry Potter books, which were translated into multiple languages. In that series, hagrid speaks with a regional accent and frequently uses slang expressions. In this case, regional varieties of the target language were often used to convey a similar feel to the original.
Translators of texts with plays on words and cultural references have several options, including leaving the original word, phrase, or expression, changing the original to make sense in the new language (in which case some of the feel of the original may be lost), or a compromise that leaves the original unchanged but provides an explanation. This is most often done with footnotes, and is common in cases where a smooth transition from one language to another isn’t possible. For example, in Muhammad Zefzaf’s short story The Nests, the following required using a footnote: “…Didn’t she cause Adam to be dismissed from Eden and waged a war against
Ali (May God be pleased with him)?” Although the first reference to Adam and Eve needs no explanation to the English-speaking Western reader, the second allusion involves Islamic history and may be entirely unfamiliar, but also is not easily paraphrased or explained.
In some cases, it is necessary to remove the original expression when there is no linguistic or cultural equivalent. For example, in the novel Nineteen Minutes, when a police officer enters a walk-in freezer looking for a suspect, he raises his gun and says, “Freeze!” The character then smiles to himself thinking about the irony. This linguistic humor does not work in Spanish and so is removed.
What is the most challenging aspect of literary translation to you? What advice would you offer someone interested in working as a literary translator? Share your thoughts below!
