Blog Post 11 - TayTina's Collablog!!

As you read the following blog post, you should know Taylor and Christina grinded out extremely hard together and created a true work of art.

Translations:

#1:Gregory Samsa woke from uneasy dreams one morning to find himself changed into a giant bug.

When observing this translation, I notice the difference in diction of the word, “uneasy” as opposed to in #2 for example when the dreams are described as “troubled” or #4 with the word “agitated”. These differences may seem insignificant at a first glance, but when deeply analyzing them, it changes the way the reader perceives the dreams. After glancing at the other translations, I have discovered that this one in particular has the shortest syntax of all of them. This keeps it short and to the point, with diction that is easy to read and maintains the reader’s attention. Not only is the sentence short, the individual words chosen are short and simple, despite the possibility of using longer, more advanced synonyms. However, due to this short sentence structure and diction, there was a lack of details that would have provided imagery to the audience.
#2:When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning he found he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug.

The word choice of the word “troubled” allows the reader to envision the extent of how hard the dream may have been for Gregor to handle. This also allows for the assumption that he awoke from the dream due to the degree of troubleness. In addition, the imagery in this translation seems to be apparent because this translator describes the bug with details words such as “enormous”. This forms a good image in my mind of what the bug’s size is. After reading other translations, I have concluded that imagery is a tactic used frequently, but in different ways. This is interesting because when translating something, you can choose how you want to describe something or someone.

#3:As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

The word uneasy gives off the connotation of churning and unsettledness, similar to that of an uneasy stomach, giving a visual that the audience can relate to. On top of this visual, it is also more descriptive when it comes to the word “insect” due to this narrowing down the type of bug that Gregor turned into, which gives the audience another visual to help them understand the sentence better. The structure in this translation seems to be of some significance because the translator chose to structure this sentence so that commas and other forms of punctuation were not necessary. I feel like this does not fully embody the original translation since the original has a comma in the middle, breaking the sentence up.
#4:One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin.

This translation is interesting because this translator chose to use a different type of syntax. In this translation, the sentence is longer and thus has been broken up more with the use of commas. Longer syntax can make me conclude that this translation was probably concerned with having things be “lost in translation” so they included as many words or parts of the original as possible. The use of “a monstrous vermin” gives off a different message than the other translations because the others discuss Gregor as turning into a bug or insect, where this one talks about a vermin which is a vague description of a small yet harmful mammal.
Original: Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.
This diction used in the original is not something I can read soo yeah…

I don’t even know what language this is.

Our well developed responses:

How does the word choice, syntax, punctuation, and imagery shift in each affect meaning? Is one more effective than another? Why?

Overall, word use is very important in these translations because each translator got the same generic message across, but chose different words to do so. I think it is interesting the different words that have been used to represent the same thing. For example, the translations had different words to describe the dreams and bugs. Some have positive connotative meanings and others are more negative connotative meanings. To be specific, the use of “a monstrous vermin” provides a much more negative and scarier connotative meaning than “giant bug” which seems more light hearted in comparison. In regards to the descriptions of dreams, the words “uneasy” makes the reader perceive one thing, while “troubled” or “agitated” may spark a different thing within the reader when describing a dream. Personally, the use of the word “agitated” would make it seem like the dream was abruptly stopped almost as if it was a nightmare. While on the other hand, the use of the word “uneasy” makes me associate the dream with an uneasy and queasy stomach. The shifts in imagery from one translation to another was subtle, but did make a difference in the meanings. Translation #3 was more effective than that of the others due to the use of the words “uneasy” and “insect”. These words may seem like they do not have much imagery behind them, but within the sentence as a whole and in comparison to the other sentences these two simple words allow for the audience to better see and understand the situation. The syntax of each sentence was very similar in the ways that they were all about the same length and none of them had longer length words than the others, but there were slight shifts in descriptive words from one to the next. These subtle changes allowed for more imagery and a lack of ambiguity of what the author wanted to portray.

What does this exercise bring up about the difficulty of reading translated texts?

The difficulties with reading different translations of texts includes that not all translations turn out to have the same meaning and the same wording. This lack of similarities may cause for misinterpretations of the original text. For example, while reading the translations above it is interesting how subtle changes from one to another can change the interpretation of the meanings of the sentences. Although translated texts are necessary to reach a wider variety of audiences, they may cause for issues when comparing the original to the translations depending on how closely to the original meaning it was translated to. I think that this exercise definitely shows just how different translations can be when stemming from the same original text. It also displays how differently the same thing can be interpreted. These different translations provide the same general thing, but in the eyes of the original writer, it may be completely off of the message originally meant to be given. From personal experience, I think I can attest to the difficulty of reading translated texts because when taking a foreign language, things do not have the same meaning when translated. So you cannot just translate something word for word, you have to read a sentence and get its overall message and then translate it. I guess when using my method of translation, it can pose some difficulties since some words may not have an exact match in a different language. So the person translating has to make decisions as to which word best represents whichever word lacks an exact match in that language.

How do different translations affect the tone of the sentence?

When things have been translated they can entirely change the tone of the sentence. I feel like it is really hard to translate fiction because not only do you have to understand the text in the original language, but also an additional language. In addition, fiction is not something with direct sentence structure like in non-fiction. So the translator has more freedom in that they can choose how to construct a sentence and structure the entirety of the text. I think that with  fiction being translated like the novella we’re reading The Stranger the tone of sentences can easily be changed or altered significantly from the original unintentionally. Personally, when I was reading the book I didn’t realize it was a translation until I was about a fourth of the way through. I began to notice that the sentence structure and some of the things said were strange and not very typical of things I would normally hear, so I put it together that it wasn’t originally written in english. The tone of sentences drastically changes with a translation due to not only the words that are used, but the cultures in which they are originally written. Continuing to use The Stranger as an example, this novella was originally written in French in France, which has a different culture leading to a different way of speaking and writing. The tones that we as English readers may gain from the sentences may be different than the original tones that were meant to be displayed by Albert Camus. I think that the overall tone of the story is changed more drastically than that of individual sentences, however. Although there may be slight changes in tone of the individual sentences (for example the ones above), translation is more impactful on whole paragraphs or even the text as a whole when it comes to tone because not every sentence has a change in tone when it is translated to another language, but generally the overall message and tone is slightly different.

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Works Consulted

Camus, Albert, et al. The Stranger: Albert Camus. Spark Pub., 2002.