Google translate? No thanks, these writers prove their human worth
Consider Homer's Odyssey, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, even the Bible – most English speakers will only ever know these texts in translation. For us to read it, someone with keen knowledge of the original language has taken apart, studied and interpreted every word, re-creating the author's vision for an entirely new audience.
It's a behemoth task, and one that is still undertaken on an innumerable number of texts by translators who invariably operate behind the scenes, receiving little public recognition. Today, some are being replaced by artificial intelligence.
Translation Slam, an event at this year's Melbourne Writers Festival, aims to correct this by exposing the crucial art of translation.
Two translators will go head to head, each translating the same vignette by Argentine horror author Mariana Enriquez into Australian English. They will examine the differences between their work, which will be projected side by side onto a large screen, alongside host and fellow translator Dr Gabriel Garcia Ochoa.
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'Translation provides an innumerable number of possibilities to interpret a text,' Ochoa says. 'Two translations are so seldom the same. For this event, I highlighted only about three instances where the translators wrote the same sentence.'
This is because translating literature isn't like solving an equation. Rather, it's an art form. Translators aren't simply converting a text linguistically from one language to another, Ochoa says, but from one culture to another.
'The meaning isn't only tied to the words, but to the cultural weight that those words carry,' he says. 'For example, I grew up in Mexico, where Spanish was my first language. There, the way class structures work is often unspoken. In a text, that would be clear to someone who was brought up in that cultural context, but very unclear if you're not from that culture.'
Every translator will therefore leave some kind of imprint on the text they're interpreting, says Translation Slam participant Alice Whitmore. 'Translators aren't ghosts or magicians. We leave traces. Even if you were to translate a text as literally as possible, you would be altering the text in a distinct and measurable way,' she says.
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