At Last, I Have Some Confidence in Translation

Wu Lao-shi’s translation assignment has remained untouched to this day; it will probably get fully underway during winter break.

The reason I’ve dragged my feet for so long is, of course, first that my foundation in both English and phenomenology is too weak; second, because of my incurable laziness and old-fox style of doing things. But there is also an indirect factor: I simply cannot stand typing out words from my own pen that make no sense. If it were an English-to-Chinese translation in an English exam, then of course I could quickly write down a load of gobbledygook, just as in a politics exam I can more or less allow myself to write some nonsense I myself find objectionable (though my tolerance is still quite limited); but apart from these obviously forced exam situations, I usually have a kind of almost obsessive attachment to the words I write. In a certain sense, words are the imprint of my life, my living, flowing blood. This is not to say that I have some perfectionist, nitpicking attitude toward my own writing; I neither want my words to look too ugly, nor do I want them to look overly beautiful. I only want them to seem natural, to seem “as I am.”

So translation becomes a delicate matter—this kind of writing is no longer so free, and what the translation reflects is no longer simply what I am; but translation is by no means entirely devoid of creativity, because I have to understand the original author’s thought for myself and take responsibility for the interpretation I produce. In that sense, I am still free and creative (what I mean is that understanding and interpretation are creative activities). Still, compared with writing an interpretive essay, the room for creativity in translation is unquestionably much smaller.

On the other hand, as I have said before (see “How I Choked Out a Paper”), when I write I often have to adopt a “provocative” or, if you will, “locked-horns” stance. Though I usually do not spell it out, I often need to set up some kind of “imaginary enemy” when writing—for instance, the teacher who is forcing me to write the paper, other scholars discussing the same topic, public opinion, or my former self. Setting up such a challenging opponent can provide enormous motivation for my writing—especially for those pieces that demand a lot of effort but do not flow out in a pouring or overflowing manner; if I cannot regard that kind of work as “locked-horns” grappling, then the impetus driving me to throw myself into it will be greatly diminished.

But when translating, who can I compete against? Even if it is an assignment handed down by someone, I still cannot lock horns with him through the act of translation itself. Unless there is already some translation of the text, and I am the translator of a second version, or a proofreader or reviser; then, indeed, I can find a worthy opponent for the contest.

Perhaps I could also compete with my former self—that is, for example, first produce a rather bad translation, and then proofread it myself. But since, as I said above, I find it hard to tolerate writing nonsense of my own making, it seems unlikely that I could first force myself to produce a bad translation.

In short, translation is neither a natural outpouring of writing, nor is it easy to find the pleasure of battling someone in it, so where does the motivation come from? If it is something that lacks sufficient intrinsic motivation, then even if there are some external threats or inducements pushing me, I still find it hard to devote myself to it wholeheartedly; at best, I would do what I used to do with English—cram at the last minute right before the exam. But that is more likely to produce some vicious cycle, namely that this kind of intensive cramming against one’s own interest tends to deepen my aversion to the task, so that once there is no longer an exam fire at my eyebrows, I become more and more unable to invest myself in it in ordinary times.

Hard work and diligence are simply not in my nature. Although I claim that I can tolerate most things that at first glance seem disgusting, that is only on the premise that you allow me to take my time and treat them with detached ease. But if you want me to throw myself, tense and focused, into something that is not in itself pleasant, that will be very difficult. This temperament is probably why, since childhood, I have always been bad at English but good at math.

Fortunately, in foreign languages I now also see a new hope: I do not need to study foreign languages desperately for the sake of exams, but can take reading foreign texts as an activity of reading in a different mode of thought, and reading is something I like, and trying out different ways of thinking is also something I like. So at least as far as reading is concerned, an interest in reading foreign languages is something that can be cultivated.

So how can one find pleasure in translation? Perhaps at least the following aspects are worth mentioning: first, there is the “sense of accomplishment” as a whole—successfully translating such a long and difficult text through one’s efforts is an achievement that can make one proud, and this is of course an important pleasure; second, there is the “word game” aspect. Weighing words and sentences with painstaking care is itself a kind of game-like activity, a bit like guessing riddles, filling in blanks, matching couplets, and the like; after wracking your brains and finding an apt translation, you can feel quite pleased with yourself. Finally, translation is in a certain sense also a contest with the original author—not only must I understand your line of thought, but I can also, without distorting the original meaning, make use of the flexibility of Chinese to reproduce your thinking in a fuller or more vivid way in at least some passages. In translation, of course, one inevitably has to resort to some stiff and verbose wording to render the original meaning intact; but at times one can also make language that is stiff or verbose in the original become smoother and more concise. Although it is truly difficult to maintain the lofty ideal of “faithfulness, expressiveness, elegance” from beginning to end, as long as one can occasionally achieve “elegance” in a few places, that is enough to give one a little private satisfaction.

My experience of these possible pleasures has benefited from a translation—or, more precisely, a proofreading job—I recently did for Sun Lao-shi’s class. Here is how it happened: in the second half of the term, the arrangement for Sun Lao-shi’s course on original works in philosophy of technology is that in each class, the first half is given over to two students’ reports on various topics, and the teacher distributes reference materials in advance, excerpted from some guide to philosophy of science. I chose the topic of realism, which I am scheduled to report on next week, and the other student presenting at the same time was a student from the medical school. As for me, I was still the same lazy old fox, insisting on dragging it out until this final week before I would work hard to prepare; but that classmate had already done her homework early and even translated the entire set of reference materials into Chinese. Well then, that was perfect: let her handle the task of explaining the materials, and I would talk about some things outside the materials according to my own line of thought. But after all, she is not a philosophy student, so it would not do to dump the entire job of presenting the materials on her. So I said I would help proofread the translation.

I first typed her translation into the computer, and then checked it against the original. This would have been fine if I hadn’t looked, but one glance and I was shocked—good heavens, this is killing me, this job is really going to cost me my life… Every sentence of the translation was virtually incomprehensible; not only was the rhetoric incoherent, the meaning was also completely off, and from time to time it even made me nostalgic for Kingsoft Fast Translation. Comparing it with the original, it was obvious that she had not understood the author’s line of thought, and all sorts of mistranslated sentences sprang up one after another…

Of course, I do not mean to disparage that classmate; she only translated it for her own use in the first place, and it was I who took the initiative to ask for it and mess with it. It is those so-called “translators” who take something like an owl-maggot-style translation and publish it as a book that are truly outrageous. What I mean is that I got, at the right moment, a translation that was bad enough, and because I had promised to “proofread it once,” I bit the bullet and worked through it. In the end, it gave me a bit of confidence in my own ability to translate.

The greatest advantage of proofreading someone else’s translation is this: the gobbledygook was not typed out by me—that was not my doing! I am only making some adjustments on someone else’s foundation. Of course I must take responsibility for the adjustments I make, but I no longer have to be responsible for the original “character” of the translation. Thus, although the proofread text still seems all kinds of incoherent, it is obviously more tolerable for me, and getting started becomes possible, rather than ending up in the state where, if someone asked me to translate directly, I could not squeeze out even a single sentence.

Even though I hardly considered doing any rhetorical polishing and only corrected the parts that had deviations in meaning and had to be changed, the adjustments I made were enough to transform the original translation beyond recognition. This article is by no means obscure, yet as a philosophical text, the coherence of its line of thought cannot be ignored. Once some key links are not read correctly, the entire understanding of what follows can become a total mess, and the result is that the whole translation becomes extremely bizarre. Seen this way, the claim that translation work is “first academic content, second Chinese, third the foreign language” really makes sense. Once I have a general grasp of the issue or the author’s line of thought, then even without comparing with the original, I can see the problems in the translation; although I may lack familiarity with the subtle usage of certain English words, once they are placed in context, I can rely on Kingsoft PowerWord, or even without a dictionary, to be confident of their meaning. Looking at it this way, with my current level, it may well not be impossible for me to have that translation task more or less ready by the beginning of next semester.

Of course, helping someone else proofread and my translating directly are still two different things after all, and for me to bravely type out the first translated sentence seems to still require some time for feelings to ferment. Perhaps I could first find translation software to help me produce a gobbledygook translation, and then allow myself to shed the burden and proofread it? Even if more than ninety percent of the sentences would probably end up being rewritten entirely, having a particularly terrible draft after all helps me reduce my guilt toward the text… Uh, or maybe in the future we should simply label a book we translate as: Kingsoft Fast Translation, Kingsoft PowerWord, Google / etc. translation, and Gu Chu / proofreading. I wonder whether any publisher would dare to publish that; perhaps it could be counted as performance art?

December 22, 2008

Latest Comments

• mist

  2008-12-24 20:48:56 Anonymous 219.234.81.62

  I came to say that the Twitter page has already been closed, and the email is now imist—that is, changing aleph in the class address book to imist; 139 limited the length to 5 or more characters, otherwise it would have been mist. In addition, that live.com email has also been restored, but the gmail one has already been deleted and cannot be recovered, so forget it.

• Gu Chu

  2008-12-24 21:39:56 

  Good, good. When will there be a bg?
  By the way, it seems my address book got lost… forget it…

• mist

  2008-12-25 09:44:12 Anonymous 124.205.78.223

  Wait until after I tg, then bg… Probably when it’s time to work.
  Or maybe next time on my birthday for bg, then there’s still one more year.

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.