{"id":13216,"date":"2015-04-28T10:43:14","date_gmt":"2015-04-28T14:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=13216"},"modified":"2015-04-28T10:43:14","modified_gmt":"2015-04-28T14:43:14","slug":"humphrey-davies-on-representational-translation-and-the-uses-of-urban-dictionary-and-google-translate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/humphrey-davies-on-representational-translation-and-the-uses-of-urban-dictionary-and-google-translate\/","title":{"rendered":"Humphrey Davies on \u2018Representational Translation\u2019 and the Uses of Urban Dictionary and Google\u00a0Translate"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"leg_over_leg34\"<\/a>via Arab Literature (in English) byB\u00a0MLYNXQUALEY<\/a><\/span><\/span> on<\/em> 0<\/a> )<\/span><\/p>\n

During his talk about\u00a0<\/em>Leg over Leg\u00a0on Saturday\u2019s Library of Arabic Literature workshop in Oxford, Humphrey Davies discussed\u00a0the \u201chardest challenge for me as a translator in this book\u201d:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"UD-logo\"<\/a>This was, he said, the lists of words that are like a\u00a0\u201cmagical invocation\u201d in Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq\u2019s\u00a0text, through which \u201can almost surreal affect is achieved.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the middle of a sentence,\u201d Davies said, \u201cyou may get a list of words with no definition. Obscure, arcane words;\u00a0words he did not expect you to know.\u201d<\/p>\n

An\u00a0attempt to achieve a one-to-one correspondence\u00a0of these words, Arabic to English, would be doomed to some kind of failure, Davies\u00a0said. Indeed, researching the meanings of\u00a0words and trying to map them to English just didn\u2019t work. \u201cEven if the English language\u00a0has\u00a0248 words for pudendum, you can be pretty much certain that\u00a0those 248 words will not map accurately onto the words you found in Shidyaq.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I started experimenting with other approaches.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the middle of one list, where the narrator is\u00a0speaking of the charms of women, he also gives antonyms, some of which Davies read off on Saturday:\u00a0\u201crunts, trolls, long-necked pinheads\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I took these from the Urban Dictionary<\/a> online,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In another occasion, Davies said, \u201cI took the Arabic words, and I put them through the Google Latin translate facility and came up with words that have some claim to reflect the meanings, but which are very strange to hear, which was the intended effect.\u201d<\/p>\n

The final strategy Davies discussed for these lists was \u201crepresentational translation.\u201d In this, Davies said he took a list of the Arabic words, arranged them in subgroups, and then found words in English in the thesaurus, grouped\u00a0such that they have \u201csome internal logic, and then present that as a representational translation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Davies did footnote it every time he used a \u201crepresentational translation,\u201d as contemporary readers do have an expectation, he said, of literal, one-to-one correspondences in their translations, whereas Davies\u2019 translation was\u00a0moving more toward\u00a0conveying what the Arabic did for the reader.<\/p>\n

He also wanted to make clear:<\/p>\n

Despite all these pyrotechnics, we must never forget that this book actually was not just about being clever, and that it\u2019s one of the most intellectual engaged, one of the most surprisingly modern sensibilities\u2026he talks about human rights, he talks about the stupidity of trying to persuade people to your point of view through violence, he talks about his fears of his wife\u2019s infidelities, his wife\u2019s fears, his fear of erectile dysfunction. \u2026 It\u2019s not just about word games.<\/p>\n

Also, from yesterday:<\/strong><\/p>\n

What Does It Matter If \u2018Leg Over Leg\u2019 Is the \u2018First Arabic Novel\u2019?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

via Arab Literature (in English) byB\u00a0MLYNXQUALEY on APRIL 28, 2015 \u2022 ( 0 ) During his talk about\u00a0Leg over Leg\u00a0on Saturday\u2019s Library of Arabic Literature workshop in Oxford, Humphrey Davies discussed\u00a0the \u201chardest challenge for...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12,103],"tags":[1452],"class_list":["post-13216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arab-culture","category-arabic","category-translation","tag-humphrey-davies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13216"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13219,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13216\/revisions\/13219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}