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Babel A3: Fidelity and betrayal
The concepts of fidelity and betrayal are serving double-duty here. One the one hand, it's a true representation of the perils of translation (he says, being very monolingual). But it's also a pointer to Robin's two identities: is he an Oxford scholar, part of the establishment and therefore a coloniser; or is he a Cantonese immigrant, being used by an empire simply for the material value they can extract from him?
Comments
I disagree that it is a true representation of the perils of translation, but never mind. I think the dichotomy is more between globalised and local elites.
Particularly with the tension introduced by Griffin, and the unease that Robin feels about him, especially as the demands for more direct action increase
Sorry, but I don't understand either point you're making here. Could you please expand?
I really liked this analogy - my reading of it is that in translating from one language to another there are different kinds of fidelity we can use "word for word [or] sense for sense" as Letty put it. Sometimes you come across the terms literal or dynamic translations to express the idea. But each kind of fidelity to one mode of translation introduces betrayal to another - inevitably, as the connotations of word 1 in language A are not the same as those of word 2 in language B, even if they overlap at their core. Things like synonyms and homonyms, word play and such like all muddy the waters.
If you'll indulge me, I'll copy in some thoughts from a session I led a few years ago on the difficulties of translating poetry.
Here's a piece of English poetic doggerel...
The boy stood on the burning deck
His feet were covered in blisters:
He had no trousers of his own
He had to borrow his sister's.
Now, doggerel it may be, but it adheres to a lot of the conventions of English poetry. So it has a regular metre (pulse) with alternating lines of 4 and 3 stressed beats, which is one variation of ballad metre. The pulse is iambic, meaning that the unstressed beat comes first and the stressed one second. The 2nd and 4th lines rhyme.
Now suppose you were translating this into (modern) Greek. If you do a literal word-for-word version then you'll find it almost impossible to get the regular metre. In any case, most poetic traditions don't rely on metrical stress so the end result would not sound natural to a native speaker. Indeed, lots of languages don't use stressed syllables to structure sentences at all, but use something different like syllable length rather than stress (there are some interesting studies showing that when you take into account speed of diction, the rate of information transfer between different native language speakers is broadly uniform the world over).
The word order may be quite different between languages, eg "his" may be a suffix on "feet" rather than a separate word. And many languages do not use our English normal subject - verb - object word order - for example Semitic languages typically use verb - subject - object. It seems that world-wide, subject - object - verb is the most common. But then, many languages including English often rearrange order to indicate emphasis or importance (compare "he went to the house" with "it was the house he went to").
Then you get to end rhyme. In Greek the words for blister and sister are entirely different. Blister is most likely φουσκάλα but could be a couple of other words. And where we use the same word for a female sibling, a female nurse, and a female member of a religious order, Greek has three separate and entirely unlike words, so you have to choose whether to use αδερφή, νοσοκόμα or καλόγρια. Admittedly in this case it's almost certainly the female sibling in mind, but in other cases it won't be so clear cut.
So that means you have to make all kinds of choices. Are you going to stick to a literal word-for-word translation and abandon any hope of making it sound like a piece of authentic Greek poetry? Are you going to try to keep the metre as what it was in the original, or look for a typical Greek form to take its place, and build your translation around that? Which word for sister are you going to use, and are you going to make any attempt to keep the end-rhyme?
Going back to the topic of the discussion starter, any of these choices are faithful in one sense and treacherous in another. It is impossible to have a translation which is entirely faithful in all "dimensions" - somewhere you have to introduce betrayal.
I've never seen or heard of translation doing magic. The perils of translation at university are things more like carpal tunnel syndrome, and embarrassment when you make a boner mistake. Whoooops!
As for the other point, I'm reminded of what Elizabeth May said to the Tory Party of England conference:
You can read the speech here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/full-text-theresa-may-s-conference-speech/
I thought the Cantonese immigrant/colonizer thing was far more important than the language thing, to the point that the language thing was a concept built for the sole purpose of mirroring the immigrant/colonizer thing as a device. it had no being on its own.