The USA & TRANSLATION INDIAN TRANSLATORS Simon Girty Squanto Sakajavea TRANSLATION OF BIBLE & IDEOLOGY Also known as The Bay Psalm Book POLITICS LITERARY TRANSLATION EZRA POUND (1885-1972) • Make It New (1934) • Literary Essays (1954) • “The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension” ROMAN JAKOBSON (1896-1982) • On Linguistic Aspects of Translation (1959) • “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey”. EUGENE NIDA (1914-2011) • American Bible Society (1943) • Toward a Science of Translating (1964) • “The translator must be a person who can draw aside the curtains of linguistic and cultural differences so that people may see clearly the relevance of the original message” (1986) SUSAN BASSNETT-MCGUIRE (1945) • Translation Studies (1980) BURTON RAFFEL (1928-2015) • The Art of Translating Poetry (1988) Types of translation: • formal • interpretative • expansive • imitative ROBERT BLY (1926) • Eight stages of translatio” (1991) 1. Setting down the literal translation 2. Get a handle on the concepts and beliefs presented in the original poem; abandon the poem if the translator does not feel a connection with them. 3. Rewrite the literal translation to ensure the meanings of the poem are not lost. 4. Translate the latest draft into spoken English, using phrases that have been heard in natural conversation. 5. Examine the translation in terms of tone to ensure that it carries over from the original (whether happy, sad, etc.) 6. Listen to the original for sound and carry those same sounds over to the translation, such as the use of open vowel sounds. 7. Speak with a native speaker to go over the translation to ensure meanings and tone are maintained. 8. The final stage is completing the translation with all of the advice given and paying close attention to the original poem’s rhythm and rhymes (which are often less about end rhymes than internal rhymes). LAWRENCE VENUTI (1953) • The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995) • “Translation is a form of passive aggression. In doing it, a writer chooses to forgo original authorship so as to play havoc with a foreign original in a process of imitation, zigzagging between the foreign and receiving languages but in the last analysis cancelling the first in favor of the second.” Thank you
