Laura Freeburn Translations LLC

Author: lefreeburn

  • Bambi (part II)

    See below for the introductory post about Bambi. This post compares the old translation and the new translation; let’s call them OT and NT.

    My edition of the OT was kindly purchased for me by my traumatized reader (see intro post) from a used book shop in Tennessee. It had previously been given as a Christmas gift to one Alma Kathryn in 1942, the year the Disney movie came out. Although recent articles have emphasized the extent to which the film eclipsed the book, it seems at least some people were inspired to buy the book after seeing the film.

    According to the New Yorker article, it has been claimed that the OT “mistranslated Salten, flattening both the political and the metaphysical dimensions of the work.” However, the author of that article goes on to say, “that claim is borne out neither by examples in the introduction [to the NT] nor by a comparison of the two English versions, which differ mainly on aesthetic grounds.”

    One sentence might suffice to give you a sense of their aesthetic differences (part of a description of Bambi as a disoriented newborn):

    German original: Es nahm auch noch keinen einzigen von all den Gerüchen wahr, die der Wald atmete.  

    OT: Nor did he heed any of the odors which blew through the woods.  

    NT: Nor did he perceive a single one of the smells that the forest exuded.

    Moving on, is there any evidence that the OT contains significant errors, and do they “flatten the political and metaphysical dimensions of the work”?

    The OT is often accused of sloppy taxonomy, e.g. “Eisvogel” (“kingfisher”) is translated as “hummingbird.” Was that an error or just an adaptation for American readers who wouldn’t be familiar with kingfishers? To add to the confusion, the NT translates “Eisvogel” as “warbler.” Why? It’s not an option in any of my reference books, so it seems like another error or adaptation. This is a recurring problem—titmouse or chickadee? Ferret or polecat?—but frankly not very interesting to most readers.

    The error that most jumped out at me from the OT was as follows: the kingfisher from the paragraph above is quite anti-social. Another bird (sedge-hen or coot?) tells Bambi that the kingfisher has never said a word to anyone. Bambi replies, “Poor thing…” with the ellipsis indicating a pensive, sorrowful tone (rather than an incomplete sentence). (In German: “Der Arme…” with “Arme” capitalized because it is an adjectival noun.) Presumably thrown off his game by the ellipsis and a failure to notice the capital A, Chambers (author of the OT), has:

    “The poor…” said Bambi.

    Then I checked the NT and was surprised to see the exact same error, only ramped up:

    “The poor…” Bambi began to say.

    (The new translator has added the idea that he “began” to say it.)

    Seeing this in both books made me doubt my judgement so I consulted two native speakers with excellent writing skills and they both confirmed it could only be “poor thing” and the ellipsis was there to signal his tone.

    So, as we can see, both books contain errors (as do most long translations, including mine). But do the errors in the OT really give readers a highly distorted experience of Bambi, as some have claimed?

    Some examples to back up that claim can be found in an article by Sabine Strümper-Krobb in the journal Austrian Studies. Strümper-Krobb closely compared the German original to Chambers’ translation and found that Chambers often translated anthropomorphic language into language that is more conventionally about animals. See this table for examples:

    SaltenChambersShould be
    Das waren die Tage, in denen Bambi seine erste Kindheit verlebte.These were the earliest days of Bambi’s life.childhood
    Überall gab es solche Straßen, sie liefen kreuz und quer durch den ganzen Wald.There were tracks like this everywhere, running criss-cross through the whole woods.streets (referring to deer trails)
    Er kam mitten im Dickicht zur Welt, in einer jener kleinen, verborgenen Stuben des Waldes…He came into the world in the middle of the thicket, in one of those little, hidden forest glades…rooms
    Hier in dieser Kammer war Bambi zur Welt gekommen.Bambi had come into the world in this glade.chamber
    Dann küsste sie wieder ihr Kind….Then she kissed her fawn again…child
    “Das sind die Kleinen.”“Those are ants.”the little ones
    “Weil wir niemanden töten.”“Because we never kill anything.”anyone/anybody (this is Bambi’s mother saying deer don’t kill other animals)
    Ganz langsam schritten sie durch einen Saal himmelhoher Buchen.They walked very slowly through a grove of lofty beeches.hall
    der Alte, der alte Fürstthe old stagThe old one, the old prince
    Liebeszeit der Königemating seasonthe kings’ time of love
    Kroneantlerscrown
    die anderen gekröntenthe other bucksthe other crowned ones

    In other words, unconventional words and phrases that make the animal world seem more human are translated as conventional terms relating to animals and the forest.

    I think (though it’s pure speculation) that the reason for this is as follows: One thing translators do all the time is adjust phrases to make them sound more “normal” in the target language. You read the source text and understand it but you also think, “That’s not how we say that,” and you adjust it to bring it into line with customary English usage. So, for example, you have a German phrase that translates to “Issuing threats against the world community” and you change it to something like “Threatening the global community.” I suspect Chambers was going through this book thinking “we don’t call antlers ‘crowns’ in English” and “no one would call a forest glade a ‘room’” and just making it all sound more normal. What he didn’t realize was that Salten’s word choices weren’t normal in German either and of course, unusual diction in the source should be translated as something equally unusual in the target. Chambers had learned German fairly recently and therefore hadn’t read widely enough to make judgements about which word choices are unusual in that language. That’s what I suppose, anyway.

    How much did Chambers’ less-anthropomorphic diction affect English readers’ experience of the story? I’d say a little bit but not that much. When we read of Bambi and his mother walking on “streets” in the forest, we’re likely to picture streets in a town and consider that deer feel the same way about their trails as we feel about our streets. Chambers’ “tracks” and “trails” don’t call forth the same thoughts. However, the book as translated by Chambers is still deeply anthropomorphic. It couldn’t be otherwise, with passages like this, where Bambi considers striking up a conversation with the intimidating old stag:

    Bambi did not know what to do. He had come with the firm intention of speaking to the stag. He wanted to say, “Good day, I am Bambi. May I ask to know your honorable name also?”

    Yes, it had all seemed very easy, but now it appeared that the affair was not so simple. What good were the best of intentions now? Bambi did not want to seem ill-bred as he would be if he went off without saying a word. But he did not want to seem forward either, and he would be if he began the conversation.

    The stag was wonderfully majestic. It delighted Bambi and made him feel humble. He tried in vain to arouse his courage and kept asking himself, “Why do I let him frighten me? Am I not just as good as he is?” But it was no use. Bambi continued to be frightened and felt in his heart of hearts that he really was not as good as the old stag. Far from it. He felt wretched and had to use all his strength to keep himself steady.

    The old stag looked at him and thought, “He’s handsome, he’s really charming, so delicate, so poised, so elegant in his whole bearing. I must not stare at him, though. It really isn’t the thing to do. Besides, it might embarrass him.” So he stared over Bambi’s head into the empty air again.

    “What a haughty look,” thought Bambi. “It’s unbearable, the opinion such people have of themselves.”

    Did you read that and think, “I don’t get these deer, they don’t seem very human to me”? They might as well be eyeing each other up during intermission at the Vienna Court Opera.

    Interestingly, Chambers uses “people” in that last line, whereas the German says “Es ist unerträglich, was so einer sich einbildet” – “so einer” meaning “such a one.” So in this case Chambers has added an explicitly human word where there wasn’t one in the German original! Which makes me fairly certain he didn’t have a policy of de-anthropomorphizing Salten’s forest dwellers and his word choices in the table above are just examples of overly cautious handling of unusual phrases.

    In summary, there’s room for improvement in the OT but on the whole, it’s well-written, true to the spirit of the book, and accurate enough that little Alma Kathryn didn’t have a radically different reading experience from her counterparts in the German-speaking world.

    As for the NT, it corrects some but not all of the discrepancies noted in the table above. Where Salten has “Straße” for a deer trail, this version has “path,” which is unsatisfactory in the same way as the old translation. But it does correctly say “We never kill anybody” (instead of “anything”) and “chamber” for “Kammer.” The writing style is quite different from the OT and readers can decide for themselves which one they prefer. The OT has the advantage of having been written in the same decade as Salten’s book, so its style has a natural compatibility with the original that is hard to achieve almost 100 years later. I would recommend the OT to most readers based on the quality of its prose.

    I could go on and on about little details in these books, but I suspect most of my readers will be satisfied with the few examples cited so far. Don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you would like to know more.

  • Bambi (part I)

    I have a reader who maintains that Disney’s Bambi practically ruined what good disposition he had, if he had any. He’s also been haunted by the cold war since listening to the Army-McCarthy hearings in his crib, and one of the cold-war specters haunting him is Whittaker Chambers, who first translated Felix Salten’s Bambi into English. After reading a New Yorker article that triggered his bad cervine/political memories, he kindly bought me the original German Bambi, Chambers’ translation, and a new translation that just came out, and asked me to write about them. So here’s an introductory post about the book, and the next one will get into the details of the translations.

    Felix Salten was a Viennese writer of the Café Griensteidl’s “Young Vienna” school. He produced a wide variety of journalistic pieces, art and theater reviews, plays, short stories, essays and novels. Bambi was one of many stories he wrote about animals, whom he observed closely and regarded with deep affection and solemn awe. As a careful hunter (in contrast to careless Yosemite Sams like Archduke Franz Ferdinand), he appreciated the terrible grandeur of the circle of life.

    People who’ve seen the film are often surprised by how much pain, sorrow and death are in the book, although of course Disney’s version also has its dark moments. Recent articles have described it as “sugary” or “a syrupy love fest” and that’s partly true, but the sight of Bambi helplessly calling for his slain mother as the forest fades to black, white and blue is what robbed my reader of his good disposition (if he had any). I also asked my mom about it – she was born in 1938 and saw it at age 4 – and she said this:

    It was the first movie I was ever taken to. We went to Grandma Berry’s in Neponset and the good movie theater was in Kewanee. I think I may have been with other cousins, don’t remember, as there were 3 of us girls. I was so stunned by the death of Bambi’s mother that I couldn’t figure out why they took me to see it. It created a fear that I could lose my mother, which I never had considered at that age.

    By the time I saw it at the same age in 1982, I was too jaded by TV to be seriously upset by it. But I did remember the two distressing parts. My young mind conflated them so that I recalled Bambi’s mother as having been shot while trying to flee the forest fire. I can still replay the relevant scene in my head (a scene that doesn’t actually exist because the fire and the shooting are separate incidents). The movie also shows us the hardship of forest life in winter, a violent clash between bucks during mating season, and a fight with hunting dogs, so the book’s harsh elements weren’t eliminated. However, it’s certainly true that the movie is much cuter and less profound than the book.

    Whereas the forest in Disney’s Bambi is a carefree playground when Man’s away, Salten’s Bambi opens with his mother’s harsh and solitary labor and quickly moves on to young Bambi witnessing a mouse’s death by ferret and absorbing his mother’s fear of danger. The danger she fears is Man (and let me just note here that as an American and a Midwesterner, I think this book would have been quite different had the author lived in a country with wolves and coyotes). Other, smaller animals also live in fear of forest predators. The book disabuses readers of the same naive ideas about nature that inspired this meme:

    But Salten’s work is first and foremost a meditation on the joys and sorrows of all living things, their beauty, prowess and dignity, their vulnerability – which Man, despite his devious arts, ultimately shares – and the transcendent sublimity of nature, created and watched over by a mysterious supreme being. Salten focused on “simple and eternal things” as Beverley Driver Eddy writes in her excellent biography, Felix Salten, Man of Many Faces. Many threads are woven into Bambi: Salten’s own love for nature and animals, the Bildungsroman genre, Aesop’s fable of the dog and the wolf, real-life anecdotes, a vision of prelapsarian harmony between man and beast, a yearning for justice, and a delight in imagining animal equivalents of human manners and morals. Like any mature work of art, it can be appreciated by all kinds of people with different perspectives, who may draw insights from it that are so deep they are hard to articulate.

    With that in mind, I’ll have to address the fashionable notion that Bambi is a simple allegory about persecution of the Jews in Europe or of ethnic minorities in general. The New Yorker article states: “[…] authors do not necessarily get the last word on the meaning of their works, and plenty of other people believe that Bambi is no more about animals than Animal Farm is. Instead, they see in it what the Nazis did: a reflection of the anti-Semitism that was on the rise all across Europe when Salten wrote it.”

    Salten himself was a Jew living through the cycle described by Theodor Herzl, “We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution.” Like the rest of Vienna’s Jewish literati, he had a complex identity and a sharp awareness of man’s inhumanity to man. This aspect of his personal perspective would certainly have influenced his work to some extent. For example, the deer community’s discussion in Chapter 9, where eschatological hopes of the lion lying down with the lamb alternate with an old doe’s wry one-liners, has a Jewish vibe.

    But to interpret the book as an allegory of human affairs along the lines of Animal Farm is a disservice to the author. I hope I managed to emphasize sufficiently above that Salten was fascinated by and devoted to animals per se in a way Orwell, or indeed Aesop, was not. (The first “farm book” that springs to mind when I think of Bambi is not Animal Farm but Charlotte’s Web.) And as a writer with good artistic sense, he aimed much higher than connect-the-dots social allegory.

    Note that the New Yorker quote above claims that the Nazis saw Bambi as an allegory. That article goes on to say “Does all this make Bambi a parable about Jewish persecution? The fact that the Nazis thought so is hardly dispositive – fascist regimes are not known for their sophisticated literary criticism […]” I searched the internet for evidence of that claim, and found no Nazi denunciations of Bambi quoted anywhere. Then I combed through Eddy’s biography of Salten, which discusses the banning of his books by the regime in the mid-thirties, and found no evidence there either. So then I wrote Eddy an email to ask if any Nazis had ever made statements about Bambi being a parable about Jewish persecution, and she said she never found any evidence for that in her research. She added that if they had viewed it that way they probably would have burned it in 1933 – instead, it was banned in 1935 and never burned – and that if she remembered correctly, it was the last of Salten’s books to be removed from libraries and bookstores. I’m not sure where the author of the New Yorker piece got this idea, but I’m pretty sure it’s mistaken.

    That said, I thought the New Yorker article was very good on the whole. My specter-haunted reader thought so, too. It’s interesting to see the original Bambi getting renewed attention. See my next post for more attention from me, about the nitty-gritty of the German-to-English translations.

  • Translating the British press’s silliness

    Here’s an interesting article about how to translate “Pork Pie Plot” into other languages, especially in the context of headlines. The PPP is an attempt to unseat Prime Minister Boris Johnson (who, incidentally, is descended from one of the best-known and most controversial German-to-English translators, Helen Lowe-Porter).

    a pork pie

    With regard to headlines, two questions come up here: 1. Should you use these kinds of quirky foreign phrases in headlines? And 2. If you do, should you translate them or leave them in the original language?

    My answer to (1) would usually be yes, because it’s an attention grabber. The answer to (2) largely depends on what the two languages are and whether the speakers of the target language tend to be familiar with the source language. You might include Spanish in a US newspaper headline but you wouldn’t do the same with Mongolian. It also depends on whether the target language has a clear equivalent. I googled “torta di maiale” and found that Italy seems to have pork pies that look a lot like the British ones, so sure, go ahead and translate “the Pork Pie Plot” as “il complotto della torta di maiale.” Google Translate is a little confused about this food item, though:

    Mmmm…pork cake….

  • Welcome to Welsh

    We don’t need to talk about German all the time here. Let’s consider a tongue known for its siren-like hold over language nerds: Welsh.

    I received Welcome to Welsh from a family friend who was majoring in linguistics when I was in 8th grade in 1990. He had it, and knew I would want it, because if you have the language-learning bug, the moment you see a sentence like “Oeddech chi wedi meddwl am fynd i Landudno yn yr haf?” you know you will never be at peace until you learn to talk like that.

    I’m not sure how Welsh feels to young people nowadays, but back then it enjoyed a curious status in the quieter corners of American youth culture. Not only because it was the Holy Grail of language nerds, but because it conjured the Welsh imaginary which nourished and sustained the fantasy genre. For American children who read The Chronicles of Prydain or watched The Black Cauldron, names like Gwydion and Fflewddur Fflam sounded intrinsically magical; by the time those kids got to high school, bookstores were flooded with paperback knockoffs about guys named Rhys fighting dragons on misty green islands with magic swords so they could marry Princess Gwenhwyfar and go live in the land of Ionawr or whatever.

    I swear I used to see perfectly normal people reading those books, not just boys who played D&D instead of sports. Most of them probably didn’t know they were inspired by Wales – in my experience, many Americans were unaware that Wales existed and many more didn’t realize it had its own astonishing language. But anyone who developed an obsession with foreign languages or fantasy – or, God forbid, both – was sure to be pulled into the Welsh orbit. Information was scarce in those days, however. The encyclopedia could show you a map and a picture of coal miners and provide you with a few non-magical facts. You might see A Child’s Christmas in Wales on PBS. And that was about it, unless you really made an effort or had a nice friend who could send you obscure language books in the mail.

    The Wales I discovered in Welcome to Welsh was not the Wales of my imagination. Published in 1984, it featured picture stories about people who were either living in the seventies or continuing to rock seventies styles, and who enjoyed watching TV, drinking to excess, and having casual affairs with door-to-door salesmen. Their material circumstances seemed rather shabby compared to the American suburb I grew up in, yet they outclassed me by going on holidays in St. Tropez.

    “Hell, boys, do you remember the party last night? I wasn’t drunk, but you, Dai, were on the floor – you were blind drunk. And hell, there was one pretty girl there – she was like that girl on the beach in St. Tropez.” (from a story about working on the local newspaper)

    There was definitely no magic, unless wandering around the Societies Tent at the Eisteddfod counts as a magical experience. Coal (glo) is in the glossary so it’s probably mentioned somewhere, but overall there was a distinct lack of coal mining. That may be why one of the conversation openers is “Are you on the dole?” (Here the book actually taught me a new English word – I had to ask various adults before finding one who was able to inform me that it meant “Are you on welfare?”)    

    But the local Plaid Cymru candidate is on your side:

    “What is Plaid Cymru’s policy for housewives?” – “We want to give money to housewives.”

    Quirky picture stories aside, Welcome to Welsh did turn out to be a highly informative and well-organized course in the Welsh language. I loved the layout and always found the lessons easy to absorb. These sentence-building boxes on the first two pages instantly enriched my life:

    I learned a lot from this book. Not just about the seamy side of small-town life in Wales, but about grammar and vocabulary. I didn’t put in enough effort to become fluent, but I did once give Bryn Terfel a shock when he was signing autographs at Ravinia, so all the time I spent reading this book instead of doing schoolwork was totally worth it.

    Eventually I married a fellow nerd – an alliance that gained me a Welsh book.

    His is more formal and probably has better morality, but Welcome to Welsh will always be my favorite.

  • Sorry, everyone

    Hey, entire world. I’m really sorry translations can’t be perfect.

    And by that I don’t mean translators are bound to make a few mistakes, though of course that’s also true. I mean no translation will ever be exactly the same text or give you exactly the same experience as the original. Think you’ve read War and Peace? If it wasn’t in the original Russian, it wasn’t exactly the book Tolstoy wrote. Close enough to pass as the same book, of course, but not 100% the same. The best way to understand the soul of Natasha Rostova is to read it in Russian. The rest of us are settling for exported Natashas.

    100% concordance between languages is not possible this side of the eschaton, but it seems some people just can’t bear reminders of that sad truth. Witness these complaints about the subtitles and dubbing for Squid Game on Netflix (although when an article says something has “sparked an online controversy” you never know how many people were actually involved…)

    Movie subtitles and dubbing come with particular challenges for translators, who have to consider things like how quickly the audience can read (which means subtitles almost always say less than the dialogue) and how to avoid severe mismatches between spoken dialogue and actors’ mouths. If an American actor says “ham” it might get dubbed into German as “Salami” because fits the mouth shape better than “Schinken,” which is German for “ham.”

    So there’s a lot going on, OK? As it says in the Squid Game article:

    Dr Cho said there was no such thing as a perfect translation, and differences in dialogue were unsurprising because many words, phrases or concepts were “untranslatable” from one language to another.

    “It’s not limited to English and Korean, but between English and Japanese, or even between Korean and Chinese,” she said.

    “There are always things that can’t be translated perfectly.”

    Thank you, Dr. Cho. And again, sorry everyone.

  • A letter from 1871

    The flooding in Germany this summer reminded me of this letter I translated a few years ago, and the client gave me permission to share it.

    Spork is in Nordrhein-Westfalen, right by the border with the Netherlands. Josef was a family member who had left Spork to settle in Wisconsin.

    The flood is described in paragraph 5. Apart from that, there’s news about the Franco-Prussian war, family news, and village gossip. I’ve done a little light editing.

                                                                          Spork, January 11, 1871

    Dear Josef,

    First of all, we wish you a happy new year. May the good Lord lend you his aid so that everything goes well for you in the New World and is as you would wish. Your lovely letter arrived in good condition on December 15, 1870. We were all very happy to learn that you had made it through the dangerous voyage and arrived in America. Over here, people had been saying that the ship you were on had sunk. In the future, do write to us about how you and your friends are doing. We are having a very hard winter here, for three weeks in a row it’s been 10, 12, or even 15 degrees below zero every day. We just had a few days of thaw and now it’s freezing again.

    Thank the Lord that you’re not here, for the war with France has taken on a character more serious than anyone expected. All men from 18 to 40 who are fit to bear arms are being drafted indiscriminately. Our troops are now at Paris. The strongest fortresses in France, including Metz and Strassbourg, were stormed by our soldiers and have surrendered. Now you can imagine what our boys have had to go through at Paris. The terrible cold and spending the day without shelter. You know all about that.  For the bombardment of Paris, our troops have gathered around the city with a force of eight hundred fifty thousand men. The bombardment began on December 23rd, 1870. They are using over 600 of the heaviest cannons, including twelve Riesenmörfer where each shot weighs over two hundred pounds. Our soldiers have now taken all the fortresses around Paris; the city itself has been hit in several places by our grenades and caught fire and if it does not surrender it will probably end up a pile of ash. We can only look upon it all with regret, but the Prussians alone now have over sixty thousand casualties, not counting the sick and wounded, and the French many more. Prussia has four hundred thousand French prisoners of war. The war has simply become a never-ending slaughter. How long it will last cannot be predicted, but it is certain that many, many more victims will fall.

    Now we would like to tell you about our household situation and how we are doing. We are, praise God, all in good health. Although our household entails much work and trouble, it consists primarily of our family – Father, who is still quite well, then Dora my wife, myself, my two children who are very healthy and Johann is with us. Sickly little Johann is gaining weight in defiance of all expectations and has already learned to walk. Other members of our household are Johanna, your Dora her sister, Johann Hermes from Süderwick. Stelke who makes wooden shoes is staying with us again and we are giving him plenty of help. Holzendorf has done so much to disadvantage Stelke that the latter did not receive his license. I even had to go to the Comptroller to help Stelke but it will probably be over with Holzendorf soon because all the bad things he has done are coming before the public prosecutor, including the fight at the riflery festival.

    Now for the neighbors. Recently old Kniepert sprained his leg so badly while unloading coal that he was bed-ridden for a time.  At the same time, at half past three in the morning in the Schopperts’ house, old Wilting was talking to his wife who was quite well. Immediately afterwards he tried to wake her up but could no longer do so, because she had suddenly gone to her eternal rest and was a corpse. You can imagine the grief and pain. The old man is in bed. But that family suffers from terrible misfortune. First his son drowned in the Rhine, now this. Johann Radstaak is home again but how? He’s using crutches. He was shot in the lower leg at the battle of Wörth. The bullet went through the thick flesh from behind and out through the shin bone at the front. It’s uncertain how many invalids will get pensions.

    We also have to tell you that for three weeks it rained so much here that the oldest people could not remember the water ever being so high. Near Bocholt at the Holy Image, the water overflowed onto the street and poured into the factory, causing about three thousand Thaler worth of damage. Where we are, almost everything practically turned into a lake. It was hard even to make it to a neighbor’s house. The cellars were all full of water and the big frost happened right afterwards.

    Dear Josef, now we would like to ask you to tell us more details about your journey, especially the sea voyage, because we are very curious about that. We think that of all the mortal dangers you have been through, that must be the biggest and will have made both of you unwilling to undertake such a journey again. However, if possible, we would be happy to see you two again sometime. Johanna wants to tell you something else, dear Josef. I will put down her own words here: I thank you very much for the friendly greeting you sent to me in your fine letter. Please send me such greetings again. Stelke wishes you lots of luck and prosperity and notes that not a hair falls from our heads unless God wills it so. In his infinite wisdom, he arranged your journey over the ocean so that you did not travel on the ship that sank, and in his opinion that is a sign that things will go well for you both.

    In conclusion, dear Josef, we send you a thousand greetings over the sea and express our most heartfelt wishes for your prosperity. Greetings especially from Stelke, Hermes, and Hermann Hüning who is also here and is an avid hunter. All of us also send greetings to your friends and ours and ask them to write to us sometime as well.

    Respectful greetings from your Father in particular, and your brothers and all your relatives and neighbors.     

  • Typos + MT

    Having a busy summer, as always, but here’s a brief note: typos are a problem for machine translators. The best ones (like DeepL) have some ability to recognize typos and correct for them. But they usually can’t do that when the typo is a correctly spelled word (just not the one you intended to type).

    Case in point: DeepL rendered a German sentence into English as “The magazine is available oh offline.” When I checked the source text, it turned out the author had mistyped “auch” (also) as “ach” (oh). The magazine was, in fact, “also available offline.”

    I find these things rather delightful, especially because they score a point for Team Human…for now.

  • “Wo zu finden?”

    Wenn ein Liebes dir der Tod
    Aus den Augen fortgerückt,
    Such es nicht im Morgenrot,
    Nicht im Stern, der abends blickt.

    Such es nirgends früh und spät,
    Als im Herzen immerfort.
    Was man so geliebet, geht
    Nimmermehr aus diesem Ort.

    — Justinus Kerner

    Where to be found?

    If Death’s come to take away,
    Push a loved one out of sight,
    Look not to the dawning day,
    Nor a watchful star at night.

    Look not in the sky above,
    Morn or night, but in your heart.
    From that place of such great love,
    What you’ve loved will ne’er depart.

  • More German adjective endings in English

    In this post, I discussed whether to decline German adjectives when you use them in an English sentence. I don’t, but here’s somebody doing it on the Wikipedia page for Leo von König:

    He was not well thought of by Adolf Hitler, however, and his works were removed from the “Großen Deutschen Kunstausstellung” at the Haus der Kunst in 1937.

    Had I written that sentence, it would say: …his works were removed from the “Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung” at the Haus der Kunst in 1937.

    So there!

  • Practice makes worse

    In Brideshead Revisited, Cordelia Flyte returns from her long sojourn in war-torn Spain and the narrator tells us:

    “She looked more than her twenty-six years; hard living had roughened her; constant intercourse in a foreign tongue had worn away the nuances of speech; she straddled a little as she sat by the fire, and when she said ‘It’s wonderful to be home,’ it sounded to my ears like the grunt of an animal returning to its basket.”

    “Constant intercourse in a foreign tongue had worn away the nuances of speech.” I was struck by that observation when I first read the book because it described a genuine phenomenon – one that had happened to me. Partly because time spent honing your skills in a foreign language is time not spent refining your use of your native language, but also because aspects of the other language seep into your intercourse in your own tongue, so to speak.

    It happens in both speech and writing. If you talk to me in person, you might be surprised by how often I wave my hand in the direction of a thing and say, “the, um, you know, thing,” or use slightly odd phrases like “Don’t put yourself in a drawer” rather than “Don’t box yourself in.” During a game of D&D last weekend, I was roundly mocked for saying “I want him to go over there and molest our characters.” I meant “bother,” and you can blame Spanish for that one.

    Because you have more time to think when writing, the effects there are subtler, e.g. lackluster word choice and dull or awkward phrasing.

    Working as a translator or interpreter makes the problem more acute because you are constantly under the influence of the specific words and phrases you’re reading and hearing in the other language. And if you’re not careful, the more translation work you do, the worse your product might get over time.

    When I started out in this business I was a voracious reader of high-quality English books. So my sense of what constituted good English prose was well developed and I used it to good effect when translating from German.

    But the more I worked, the more German I read, and before long, sentences like “St. Florian was not only for a period of ten years the identity-establishing and beloved working place of the composer, but is also well known as his final resting place” started to look OK to me.    

    So how does one push back against the deterioration of target-language skills?

    1. Read a lot. And I mean good writing – books that have stood the test of time, and new books that have gone through a rigorous process of copyediting and proofreading. Cardinal Newman used to read Mansfield Park every year to keep his prose style on the level. Identify authors and publications that match the style you’re aiming for. Much of what I translate from German has to do with current art exhibits, so I read art reviews in The New Yorker. I have marketing clients so I pay attention to ads and pore over catalogues.
    2. Get a copyeditor who doesn’t know your source language. Feedback from someone who is firmly ensconced in your target language is invaluable. Such a person will instantly recognize awkward phrasing that’s crept in from your source language and will know how to fix it. Teaming up with a good copyeditor ensures your translations will be excellent texts in their own right, which is what most of your clients want.

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