The Translator Relay: Don Mee Choi

[soryang]

Words Without Borders Sep 23, 2020

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question.

For September's installment, Kristin Dykstra passed the baton to Don Mee Choi, who translates between Korean and English.

The second question raised a technical point:

These are Korean adverbs or adjectives that are repeated to form a pair. Such doubling is the norm in Korean, and it accentuates the sounds, which can also have the phonetic or mimetic effects of onomatopoeia. Here are two examples (underlined):

This is the title of a poem from Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018):


우글우글 죽음
서른나흘


Death Swarmsswarms
Day Thirty-Four

I would have left the syntax the same and not been so literal. "Swarming death" rather than "Death Swarmsswarms." However, I am only an amateur. I would not correct my senior. I think the point may have been because the theme of the interview with the author/translator seems to be on "doubling" include the mental duplication of two worlds in the mind of a translator.

...Translation helped me to find my language, just as I had to create language for the poets I was translating. So the act of translation and the act of writing something “original” are often intertwined and indistinguishable for me. It’s a doubled act. It’s like I’m writing all in duplicatives, meaning language is always doubled for me. As a child, living outside of South Korea, I imagined myself living in Hong Kong and South Korea simultaneously. For me, the translation mode of existence is the doubling of home, doubling of world, doubling of history, doubling of tongue.

more: https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/the-translator-relay-don-mee-choi?src=twitter

I found Don Mee Choi's observations very insightful.

Typically, the interpretation matures and after the appropriate period of gestation, and then pours out on its own unexpectedly. Writing something immediately in English or forcing the interpretation will be awkward and may include obvious errors. Don Mee Choi's many discarded papers are for me represented by many interpretations never finished. I like her analogy with the Shaman.

[Igel]

1. A lot of translators like to make their translations sort of exotic sounding.

They can't separate the content from the form, so they foreignize.

Others nativize it. Both have adherents. I go with nativizing as necessary, because you get things like in this case.

Accentuating the sounds by duplication has one role in Korean. In another, it has a purely semantic meaning. In some languages, it's nonsense. The sounds become the meaning because they get so in the way of the meaning, rather than being an adjunct to accentuate or flavor the meaning.

Russian drips diminutives. It plays with aspect in ways you can't easily do in English. It coins words. And it also reduplicates adjectives, usually acquiring the meaning of "ever so ..." or "just a little ...". And it plays with word order. One school of poetry tended to dwell on sound, and freely coined words in order to achieve the right kind of sound picture, but the meaning still tickles underneath. Translations that focus on the meaning do the poet a disservice. Translations that focus entirely on the meaning screw over the original. Sometimes poetry is untranslatable because of the overlap in meaning that is consciously pursued, sometimes it's untranslatable because the techniques employed are medium-specific.

Czech has it's own odd rhythm, but there's also SoC writing that focuses on sound. I've tried reading some by Sys (pronounced "shihsh&quot ; it hurts. Not only are the words chosen not by meaning but by sound, making for no crutch for non-native speakers, they're also often obscure, colloquial, or mangled to fit the needs. Think sound themed blanks verth (alternating th and s).

Nida was a bible translator of note, and helped develop translation theory. Some odd examples were pointed out. "The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want; he makes me down to lie. In pastures green he leadeth me, the quiet waters by." (I'm quoting the Scottish metrical psalter, altered to provide the right meter, and not the KJV) One version had, "The The Lord is my pilot, I shall not go adrift; He lighteth my passage across dark channels; He steereth me through the deep waters. Or there's the question of how to translate the NT where Jesus is the "wine and bread" for peoples who have no knowledge of grapes and grain. Do you teach them the meaning or adapt whatever fermented beverage and baked starch-cakes they have (those are universals)?

I don't abide ungrammatical translations, which jar by their nature, in order to show the dominance of L1 over L2. They're equal. "Death's swarming swarms" might work. "Swarming deadly swarms" (or "swarms of swarming death&quot might work. The details matter, because then it has to be put into the right form. Little point using some hyperpoetic form that has no correlation in English.

Take one of the other Psalms. It's cleverly an acrostic poem. As many verses as letters of the alphabet, each verse starting with the next letter. 99% of people read through and never notice it. Or the Hebrew parallelism in even the oldest poetic forms in the Tanakh.

Similarly the wide variety of imparting some details of Russian verse. I'd hate to do that because of all the compromises. But as soon as you will say more important preservation word order original Russian than English, you've screwed over any chance of actually producing a translation. IMHO. It happens (to me from time to time) when I can't pull away from L1 enough to be fully in L2.

I've found that usually if you're L1 or dominant L1 is the target language, you tend to nativize. If your L1 or stronger L1 is the source language, you tend to foreignize--and can't understand why monolingual L1 speakers are either foppish in adoring anything different and "cultured" (for as long as its trendy and the hoi polloi don't like it) or deemed hoi polloi and dismissive of foreignizing translations.