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From: breuel@h-sc1.UUCP (thomas breuel)
Newsgroups: net.music.folk,net.nlang
Subject: Re: Translations rhyming (orig Re: Welsh song)
Message-ID: <892@h-sc1.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 29-Jan-86 06:39:11 EST
Article-I.D.: h-sc1.892
Posted: Wed Jan 29 06:39:11 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Feb-86 00:26:43 EST
Organization: Harvard Univ. Science Center
Lines: 54
Xref: watmath net.music.folk:434 net.nlang:4115

|     Hate  to disappoint  you on this point but  I  must  disagree.  For
|example, I saw  (Hofstadter's Godel, Escher,  Bach) something called the
|English French  German  Suite, which  was a translation  of  Jabberwocky
|(from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass) into French and German.
|For those  who do not  know, this is a mostly  nonsense poem  with  many
|invented words.   The translation is (to me, who knows little French and
|next to no German) very good, especially  considering  the magnitude  of
|the task.

As for the German translation, it isn't very good (just one
of the many examples of inaccuracies and superficial treatments
in Goedel, Escher, Bach).

Even though it is hard to tell (since it is a non-sense
poem, after all), there are several grammatical inaccuracies
in it. The most blatant mistake is the translation of 'beware'
by 'bewahre'. Translated back into English, the translation
of 'Beware the Jabberwock' becomes 'Preserve of the week of misery'. 

Translating the Jabberwock is a comparativly easy task, I would
say, since semantic mistakes are very unlikely to be noticed.
Of course, finding a German word which evokes the same associations
as, say, 'slithy', is impossible, but this mistake is hardly
going to be noticed or significant. Far more serious, in my opinion,
is the fact that (even young) German speakers usually do not
encounter limitations in their vocabulary every day, and that
therefore a poem made up out of non-sense words probably 
sounds much more unnatural to German than to English ears.

As soon as fine points of semantics or culture get involved,
an accurate translation becomes nearly impossible. The word
'nobility', for example, has entirely different connotations
in English than it has in German. Even an accurate translation
of the 'Lebensansichten des Katers Murr' (the beginning of which
I posted in a TRanslation into aUI some time ago on net.nlang)
will simply not mean the same thing to an American than it will
to a German, for example, because the German reader of this 19th 
century novel probably has an entirely different view of 'nobility'
than an American or Englishman (nevertheless, I highly recommend
the book. It was written by E.T.A. Hoffmann, one of the (many)
literary geniuses of 19th century Germany. It portrays society
from the point of view of a cat (100 years before 'I am a cat'),
but (:-)) it is also very enjoyable to read).

Finally, there are stylistic and grammatical limitations on
the 'translatability' of poetry. In German, individual phrases
frequenly have well-defined grammatical functions even if
word-order is changed. This makes changes in word order much
more natural and common than in English. To translate deliberate
grammatical ambiguities of English poetry, or to capture the
terseness and semantic ambiguity of Chinese poetry in German
is, on the other hand, difficult for this very reason.

					Thomas.