The British Centre for Literary Translation’s summer school at the University of East Anglia gives experienced and budding translators the opportunity to work with authors and other translators in language-specific workshops. The week-long residential course also includes seminars, lectures and panel discussions.
I went up to Norwich for a day and a night to get more of an idea of how the summer school operates, and was struck first and foremost by the dedication of those attending: the students (for want of a better word), the workshop leaders, the visiting authors and the organisers.
The workshops are the core of the summer school’s activity. This year, BCLT offered Chinese, French, German and Spanish into English; and English into Italian. The groups, ranging from five to twelve in number, work with an experienced translator to translate passages of a book in the source language, the author of which takes part in the sessions. Flitting from workshop to workshop, I was interested to discover that each group worked in similar and yet different ways.
The German group, run by Shaun Whiteside, was concentrating on a novel called Café Cyprus by Yadé Kara. At times it was like sitting in the heart of a living, breathing thesaurus as the group sought the best (most suitable) English equivalent. Zog die Wutbremse (lit. ‘pulled the fury brake’) became ‘put a lid on it’, then ‘dampened her rage’, ‘cooling down’ (‘not as vivid – too weak?’ suggested Shaun), ‘cooling it’, and ‘slamming on the brakes’. Was an Auffanglager a detention centre, a reception centre, or a holding/immigration/transit/internment camp? (A detention centre.) Would 'aggravation', 'agitation', 'don’t get worked up', 'stressed' or 'excited' work best for Aufregung?
On they went, also discussing whether certain words and phrases were anachronistic, overly offensive, or just plain inappropriate for the character who was supposed to be saying them. This is the level of detail at which the successful translator must work for every sentence of the book to feel just right.
Over in French, Sarah Ardizzone had given her group leeway to play around with the text. After a day of concentrating on choosing exactly the right vocabulary, she gave them much freer rein to translate a passage of Canadian writer Monique Proulx’s writing in two different voices, one of which had to be British and the other more flamboyant. The three sub-groups produced hilarious results: ‘Pride and Prejudice’ vs Mills & Boon (marvellously, ‘grinding their bodies together’ became ‘as one’); ‘Trainspotting’ vs a wistful, longing voice; and a Scottish version that changed the original’s ‘bears’ to ‘deer’ and ‘trout’ to ‘salmon’.
This exercise – apart from being good fun – effectively showed how far translation can go in stretching the source material. Many sentences were translated ‘really inaccurately’ as Sarah put it, but in every case, the mood remained. Paraphrase, interpretation and idiom (especially in the ‘British’ versions) became paramount.
For an author who hears words as much as sees them when writing, Monique was fascinated by the exercise. She said she would be happy for words and phrases to be changed in translations of her work as long as it created the right feeling. Or as one of the group put it, ‘For the reading journey to be the same in both languages, changes need to be made – some authors don’t understand this’.
While this was going on, the Chinese translators under the guidance of Nicky Harman were getting to grips with Xinran’s tale of a virginal girl listening to her less-than-virginal dorm-mates brag about their boyfriends. If I could just about understand some of the French, I was utterly stumped by the Chinese, for the obvious reason that not only do the Chinese characters have to be recognised but their meaning then teased out and put into an English version that makes sense. Once again though, it was humbling to see the effort that each student put into deciphering and creating every sentence.
Nicky Harman has translated some of Xinran’s previous writing, and it was nice to see the rapport between the two of them. Although not essential to the production of a good translation, a good relationship between author and translator can only be advantageous.
You might think that all this activity would be enough, but no – there was more.
James Smith, website editor (July 2009)
