Translation vs. Literary Interpretation Any

¶ … translation vs. literary interpretation

Any form of 'pure' translation is effectively impossible -- to translate something by definition is to produce an alternative version, as seen through the eyes of the translator. One debate in the field amongst translators is if oral translations have the character of literary interpretations. According to Peter Newmark: "For non-literary translation, the truth is the factual truth and in literary translation, the truth is the moral and aesthetic truth." A particular word or phrase, for example, could be phrased literally, such as the word 'fat' when translating a literary document. A more literary view of the way 'fat' was used in context might suggest that the writer actually meant someone who was contented, and at the time the author wrote, a word like 'fat' was used to convey this, as opposed to physical corpulence, which the word means today. When this judgment is made, it is argued, a work of 'literary interpretation' has occurred, not literary translation. However, an oral translator, in an 'in the moment' effort to translate what a person said, would not have to contextualize the world in the same literary fashion.

Other authors contend that fundamentally, the aim of translation is not truth. According to Daniel Gile: "if you want to get as close as possible to the 'truth', to what is really essential, I am not even convinced that there is a fundamental difference between literary translators and non-literary translators." No translator translates the text word-for-word, and specific wordings choices that influence both literary and oral content are invariably being made in Gile's view and thus all forms of translation are effectively new works of literature. Both literary and oral translators are effectively performing the same task.

There are clearly many divergent interpretive literary intentions when a reader peruses modern versions of old and new classics. For example, some translations of Homeric epics such as the Odyssey and the Iliad render both books into prose. This is justified by the argument that the original Homeric language was accessible to Homer's audience and as prose is more accessible to contemporary readers it is a better way to mimic the first reception of Greek audiences. Other classicists translate the works into a form of poetry which attempts to more accurately mimic Homeric verse. Some ancient texts are radically modernized in their language to make them seem more visceral and real, or foreign texts are denuded of their foreign phrases to convey the ordinariness of the events. All of this is an interpretive choice and quite often the most popular translations are by persons who are not able to actually speak the ancient language at all, but rather use a technical or literal translation to render the emotion and feeling of the first work into emotionally 'translatable' terms to a modern audience. But this can produce 'Ted Hughes' Beowulf' rather than a true translation of Beowulf. These seem to have an added degree of literary interpretation. An oral translator has the responsibility of rendering the person's words not as an interpretation with emotional or intellectual resonance, but for content's sake.