: Re: How should I translate this? I recently started translating a book from Turkish into English, but I'm not sure how translations are usually carried out. So, for instance, if I encounter a sentence

@Carla500

Vote Up Vote Down

My instinct is to preserve as much of the original rhythm and flow as possible, but to make it sound readable to a native ear. In both your examples, the original uses short, punchy sentences, which is a particular quirk of the writer's style. Smoothing them out by combining them, to my ear, quite literally loses something in translation.

Sometimes it's not possible to preserve every facet of the original. For example, in John Ciardi's excellent translation of Dante's Divina Commedia, there's no way to replicate the terza rima in English. Italian has enough rhymes to allow you to write aba, bcb, cdc, ded and so on, but English doesn't. Ciardi chose to rhyme each first and third line and not worry about matching up second lines with anything else. This gives the flavor of the original without forcing the English into unreadable contortions.

(0)

Login to post a comment!