Professor: Romana Čačija
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Translation of Non fiction Literary Tra-36361617
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Bertić Martina Bertić Literary Translation Professor: Romana Čačija January 20th 2015 Translation of Non-fiction The first thing that comes to one’s mind when faced with translation of non-fiction is probably a big question mark: what comprises non-fiction in the first place? Perhaps the library will not be of much help, but searching through the internet most certainly will. While thinking about literary translation, one thinks about literary genres such as fiction, drama, and poetry (which is often completely untranslatable). Non-fiction is an equally important area of literary translation as the ones listed above. The British Dictionary defines non-fiction as the branch of literature comprising works of narrative prose dealing with or offering opinions or conjectures upon facts and reality, including biography, history, and the essay (opposed to fiction and distinguished from poetry and drama). Another definition describes it as writing dealing with facts and events rather than imaginative narration, which sums up the main distinction between fiction and non-fiction. When it comes to translating the one and the other, their status should be equal: The bulk of literary translation takes the form of translating fiction, the dominant mode, and poetry. But there are other possibilities, and some translators specialize in non-fiction, drama, and even children’s literature. Some are under the impression that literary translation comprises only the genres of poetry, drama and fiction. But the same ideals that drive translators of these genres can also inspire translators whose metier is non-fiction. And let there be no mistake: non-fiction is part of literature and translation of non-fiction can properly be considered literary translation. (Landers, 103) Works of non-fiction are meant to be factual. This means magazine articles, newspaper stories, encyclopaedia entries, interviews and textbooks are all non-fiction. Many aisles in bookstores are full of non-fiction - the cooking, art, travel, science, religion, true crime, psychology and decorating sections all contain factual works. While there are no hard-and-fast rules about what makes a piece of non-fiction "literary," a good bet is that a piece of literary non-fiction will have a bit more of a story than, say, a recipe or a paragraph in a textbook. Biographies, autobiographies, essays and memoirs are among genres that may be considered creative or literary non-fiction. To help us understand the essential difference between non-fiction and fiction, let us look at an example. Traditional non-fiction: New York City has more than 1,400 homeless people. Better non-fiction: The man who has laid claim to the bench on the corner of 88th Street and Park Avenue is one of New York City’s 1,400 homeless people. Fiction: His skin the colour of rust, the man sits on his park bench next to his bag of belongings, staring at the brightly lit windows in the apartments across the street, at the strange race of people who still have hope. In the transition from plain fact to fiction, we lose statistics and focus on the individual character. The writer, having invented the character, can convey what the character thinks (Stein). He may have to deal with factual content on a larger scale, but the translator of non-fiction enjoys several advantages over the translator of fiction. Use of footnotes is not a deterrent, allowing the translator to point out any problem words or phrases, comment on his choice of words and explain cultural contexts. The tone of the work usually remains constant, maintaining a single voice throughout, while factual content is normally more important than style (although the latter cannot be ignored). Often, a translator’s foreword is permissible, providing a wider latitude for explanation of the translational choices made, and especially long, multivolume works are frequently divided among two or more translators, which reduces the length of time one must devote to a single project. The factual content of the non-fiction works and the constant tone in them is in fact what allows the division between more translators not to be harmful to the final translation. Finally, government-sponsored translation is virtually always non-fiction, and the prospect of repeat business is greater because governmental bureaus tend to rely on proven practitioners. This argument may be crucial when it comes to deciding which area of literary translation you want to engage in. In addition to all the advantages, everything that we know about translating narrative fiction applies to translating non-fiction; the same issue of the author-translator-reader relationship, the same sensitivity to nuance, and the same sense of dedication (Landers, 103). Barbara Tuchman, the late American historian and author, described the definition between the translator of fiction and the translator of non-fiction like this: I see no reason why the word [artist] should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry while the rest of us are lumped together under that despicable term 'Nonfiction'--as if we were some sort of remainder. I do not feel like a Non-something; I feel quite specific. I wish I could think of a name in place of 'Nonfiction.' In the hope of finding an antonym, I looked up 'Fiction' in Webster and found it defined as opposed to 'Fact, Truth, and Reality.' I thought for a while of adopting FTR, standing for Fact, Truth, and Reality, as my new term. In fact, when it comes to translating works of fiction and non-fiction, the general opinion is that it is easier to translate non-fiction. In my personal experience, I find translating non-fiction to be twice as challenging. First, when dealing with a work of non-fiction, you are dealing with facts. Those facts are to be presented in the same way in your translated work, as they are in the original. This means that you are supposed to familiarize yourself with a completely new area of life, religion, science, music, cosmology and many more. There is a completely new vocabulary full of technical terms you do not come across in your everyday life, and which you are supposed to learn in a very short period of time. To make things even more difficult, this research is to be done in both languages you are working with, as you are firstly supposed to understand what you are translating, and secondly, to distribute the content accurately in the translation itself, in the words of the second language that you are going to use. It is twice as challenging because you are supposed to produce a piece of art, a written form of art, just like when you are translating fiction. This means producing a clear, elegant, easily readable text following all the rules and norms that are valid for fiction translations, because just the same, you are supposed to attract readers. When translating fiction, however, there are not so many problems; it is just you and the text. It is a dual relationship with nothing and no one inside it but you and the text. As a translator of non-fiction, you may come across quite a few technical problems regarding vocabulary in particular. In some books, the terminology is very specialized and you have to find the equivalent in your own language; translators are not always specialists of every field they are translating in, of course. In the non-fiction piece that I was translating, there was a lot about music. I was quite lucky, because I enjoyed doing research about such a beautiful art, but like in many other non-fiction books, there were other areas included, such as history and religion. Translating non-fiction is very time-consuming when translators are not specialized in the field. Doing research is never as simple as just going to the library or asking around. It can be quite difficult to find precise information. To bring all of this a little closer, here are examples of problems translators of non-fiction encounter: The first problem was the Latin language. The title of the text I was translating was in Latin. I was lucky because I learned Latin in school so all I had to do was refresh my Latin grammar to figure out the number and the case of the nouns. The next problem I encountered was quotations. There was a quote I could not find translated into Croatian, so I had to translate it on my own. (I translated “You are the music, while the music lasts.” by T.S. Eliot, as „Glazba si dok glazba traje.”) Again, I was quite lucky for having an original quote in English which I could easily translate. Very often, the quotations in non-fiction books are already translations. In that case, the translator is supposed to find the original text, which is not at all easy. First, you have to find in which language it was translated, because it is not always clear from the text whether it is translated from French or German, Latin or Greek, especially in books talking about the sixteenth or seventeenth century when people would write in Latin or Greek as often as in their own languages. The third problem I would like to point out is names – names of places or historical events in one language, which I had to translate into Croatian. Having little knowledge about tablets from Nippur and Ugarit from 1400 BCE, or the murals in the Tomb of the Harpist in Egypt, I had to do my own research, which was as successful as it could be, because my research was based only on the data I found online. The time is again a big translator’s enemy. If you do not manage to find good solutions, you can always ask a specialist in the field, but then you have to bear in mind the time you will have to spend, which you do not always have as a translator. Because there are so many subgenres of non-fiction, a whole array of skills are expected from the non-fiction translator. Think about the status of the author for example. This is the fourth challenge you are facing as a translator of non-fiction. The author of the book you are working on may be a very good one, with a nice, elegant and clear style of writing. In this case, you will not have many problems, at least with communicating the content of the book to your readers. This means that you are on the same level as translating fiction - you do not have to worry about anything and no one outside your relationship with the book you are translating. With a majority of non-fiction books things are not so simple. Usually the non-fiction book exposes a point of view, and this point of view is sometimes expressed in a clear way, directly, but it can also be hidden intentionally, so that the reader does not get everything “on a silver platter”. The translator must respect the author’s ambiguity in giving his point of view and transmit it equally into another language. The translator obviously cannot always know what the author meant. In order to properly translate, he should then contact the author to ask for an explanation. If the author is dead, the translator is obliged to do a research on his own, read criticism or other books by the same author, but never interpret on his own (Losman, 50-51). The distinction between fiction and non-fiction, however, has been blurred in recent years. Novelists (writers of fiction) have based stories on real life events and characters (non-fiction), and historians (writers of non-fiction) have incorporated imagined dialogue (fiction) to suggest the thoughts of historical figures. The number of translated books published in the US is already small, but the number of those books that are non-fiction is an even smaller subset (Robinson). The following list from Goodreads may illustrate that it is in fact become more difficult to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction, and that recently, some books of non-fiction have become as popular as books of fiction. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt mels pop culture with economics. Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is a non-fiction book of science writing and dealing with ethical issues of race and class in medical research. Henrietta Lacks, as HeLa, is known to present-day scientists for her cells from cervical cancer. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells were taken without her knowledge and still live decades after her death. Cells descended from her may weigh more than 50M metric tons. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson is a 2003 non-fiction book presented in a novelistic style and based on real characters and events. The author Erik Larson imbues the incredible events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with such drama that readers may find themselves checking the book's categorization to be sure that the book is not, in fact, a highly imaginative novel. Larson tells the stories of two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the fair's construction, and H. H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a charming doctor. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is a very popular non-fiction book, an autobiography. In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern American woman was supposed to want--husband, country home, and successful career--but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she felt consumed by panic and confusion. This wise and rapturous book is the story of how she left behind all these outward marks of success, and of what she found in their place. Following a divorce and a crushing depression, Gilbert set out to examine three different aspects of her nature, set against the backdrop of three different cultures: pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. Other titles on the list include Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer; Bossypants by Tina Fey; The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls; Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling; A Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer; Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach; Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov; A Room Of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf and many other. To conclude, there are a number of arguments that support the idea of translating non-fiction to be a “double challenge”, considering the time invested in research, getting all the facts, historical names and quotations right in two languages, and giving the point of view that the author originally gave. On the other hand, some of the aspects of translating prove that translating non-fiction should be easier than translating other areas of literary translation, primarily fiction. The translator of non-fiction has more space for explanations, comments and directions for his readers; he can usually keep a constant tone throughout the work and is usually asked to translate repeatedly for the same customers. And, to return to that popular misconception that literary translation only relates to works of fiction, the translation of non-fiction has an extremely long and respectable history: it is certainly literature. It is just the rarity of it today that may make it seem “stranger than fiction” (Howard). References Landers, Clifford E. Literary Translation: A Practical Guide. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters , 2001. Print. (103-104) Losman, Danielle. Translating non-fiction. Publishing Research Quarterly. Summer 1998, Volume 14, Issue 2 (50-52) Web sites Cambridge Dictionaries Online http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/ (last visited on January 19th 2015) Howard, Elizabeth Jane. Translating for Publication: Non-fiction. http://textline.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/translating-for-publication-non-fiction/ (last visited on January 19th 2015) Popular Non-fiction Books from Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/non-fiction (last visited on January 13th 2015) Robinson, Sal. The Nonfiction Gap http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/?id=3613 (last visited on January 14th 2015) Stein, Sol. Stein on Writing. St. Martin's Griffin, 1995 http://grammar.about.com/od/mo/g/nonfictionterm.htm (last visited on January 13th 2015) Download 23.85 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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