One of the translators of Tolkien into Italian is an old friend, and I have discussed with him some of the problems he encountered in doing so. Between two Indo-European languages translation that conveys substance is always possible, but words must often be replaced by phrases, and this can be highly problematic.
Consider the character Strider. Italian has no equivalent of the verb 'to stride'. Fine, camminare a gran passi, walk in large steps, conveys the sense accurately. Unfortunately, however, a character named Camminatore-a-gran-passi has the same connotation for an Italian as Walker-in-large-steps has for an American: It strongly suggests an American-Indian character. (Italians know all about 'cowboys e indiani'.) In the end 'Strider' was left untranslated in the Italian text. Similar problems abound in translations of Pushkin from Russian into other European languages. Pushkin's texts are full of puns, deliberately contrived ambiguities, connotation-laden names, and the like too; and finding equivalents for them in another language is very difficult. In the upshot, people who, since they cannot read Russian, must depend upon inadequate translations, may wonder why Russians regard Pushkin as the equal of Shakespeare and Dante. Chomsky has maintained that there is little reason to suppose that translation is possible in general, and this is not because he does not know that it has been done brilliantly. (Unfortunately, the canonical examples are Catullus's Latin translations of some short Greek lyrics of Sappho, which somehow manage to be at once literal and perfect. It would be agreeable if they were still accessible to non-specialists, but they are not.) Text translation and the translation of, say, FORTRAN into sequences of machine instructions have some things in common, but they are also very different. Semantic ambiguity has been largely banished from procedural languages, and their translation is thus very much simpler than the translation of, for example, arbitrary Russian text into English. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
