Translations/Traductions

As I write this year's column, cbc radio is airing a program on the 'translation gap.' Looking at what is lost in the passage from one language to another has become a popular approach to translation in Canada. Inevitably, the focus is on linguistic structures, such as Québécois regional expressions, or cultural issues (attitudes towards language and nationhood) that are difficult to translate into the other language. Identifying the precise textual sites where translation cannot render an exact equivalent can provide useful information about how cultures and languages differ. However, attending only to the insufficiencies and pitfalls of translation can be limiting. We overlook what is gained, or can be gained through translation. Our attention is not directed towards what can be done to maximize cultural and literary sharing and understanding, and how we can improve the quality of our translations. Worse still, we risk forgetting that the most alarming translation gap occurs when our important literary works, in both French and English, are not translated at all.

An overview of translations published in both English and French in 2005 suggests that there is considerable room for improvement before we reach the crystal ceiling of what some might deem the linguistically, or culturally, 'untranslatable.' A broader range of books is being translated into the other language, but, numerically, translations into English continue to lag behind translations into French, although a few more anglophone presses are starting to publish translations. The choice of books to be translated, particularly into English, remains uninspiring. While some selections, in the essay category for instance, are culturally significant and easily justifiable, others appear to be related more to chance connections between publishers and translators (or writers) than to objective criteria. This holds true for both of our two solitudes.

Even more worrisome for the enhancement of literary exchange, if this year's production is indicative of a trend, the quality of the translations themselves, particularly into English, is deteriorating. To a slightly lesser degree, this is also the case for translations into French. Senior translators continue to offer professional-quality translations, but too many sloppy translations are slipping into print. Major and minor errors in meaning, incongruities in verb tense, improper diction, stylistic incoherencies and infelicities, awkward sentence structures – the list of inappropriate translation choices is long. Even the most accurate translations, in terms of meaning, too often fail to recreate the energy, literary sensibility, and forcefulness of the original. Translations into English show a frequent tendency to cling needlessly to the inevitably more expansive syntax of the French text. The result is a heavy-handed, plodding style in English. Francophone translators tend to adopt overly literary formulations at the expense of clarity. The sensibility of the English original is lost in a display of flashy, but meaningless, vocabulary. In both cases, readers are not being given an opportunity fully to engage, aesthetically, intellectually, and emotionally, with the translated texts.

Clearly, in the over thirty years since the creation of the Canada Council Translation Grant Program, we have still not developed in either language a sense of what a good translation should be, and what this requires, during the translation and editing process, to be achieved. Theatre translation is perhaps the only exception. The fact that the translation must actually 'work' on stage has led to the development of a successful team approach between translator, director, and actors. The same kind of consultation is urgently needed between translators and publishers on the one hand and teachers of literary translation in the field of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction on the other. As a starting point, the Canada Council would be well advised to reinstate the process, dropped for budget reasons, of peer review of translation drafts before grants are approved. More importantly, we need to renew our commitment to meaningful cultural exchange, and rediscover our enthusiasm for translation as a creative and stimulating literary experience.

Maurice Coindreau, who translated many of the American writers of the South, including William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, for the French press Gallimard, once wrote that he chose the books he would translate in inverse proportion to...