Excessive liberty is bad!

[drofgnal]

I've been to the country about 5-6 times for work and reading all the cultural and historical references of the P&V translation was fantastic. I've read Dunnigan the first time I read it and I enjoyed that as well, but it was just a great story. The P&V translation is a great story and a learning experience as well.

I do prefer the sparser use of French in the Dunnigan translation. At the start of the novel when Anna Pavlovna talks to Prince Vassily about Bonaparte being the antichrist the P&V translation is all French in the Dunnigan translation it goes "Eh Bien, mon prince,... Dunnigan used just enough French so you knew it was French without having to jump back and forth with French translation footnotes. But apparenlty I've read Tolstoy had a reason for using the French he did (used in upper society) and he also purposely decreases the amount of French as the book goes on indicating a declining Euro influence in Russia. Dunnigan gives you that sense without the translation footnotes.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

T
I think what disappoints me most is that the above quotes show the "cinema" reference was an insertion, without it the passage would have been a close rendering. Hence my rant against excessive liberty.

How do you react to this kind of VERY loose translation?

It's too loose, taking too much liberty with the source. It's not to do with if people understand it, or an anachronism. It's adding content that's not there at all, far beyond a paraphrase (c.f. King James, NIV, Jerusalem Bible and Living Bible vs original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek).

[Uncle Robin]

Returning to the translation that triggered this thread, the translator has done it again. Kipling's words from The White Seal:

he met all the untrustworthy ruffians that loaf up and down the seas, and the heavy polite fish, the scarlet-spotted scallops that are moored in one place for hundreds of years, and grow very proud of it

(e.a)

And the Hindi translation rendered back into English, with stiffly awkward fidelity

He also found many loafer types of sea creatures who, by their smooth talk, cheat anyone and trap them somewhere in the wrong place. He found a big fish which was very kind. A (literally "1") strange balloon-shaped creature was also found, which has remained in the same place for the last hundreds of years, as if it would be named in the Guinness Book of Records

"scarlet-spotted scallops" to "A strange balloon-shaped creature" is bad enough, imo - changing a description from colour to shape? "scarlet-spotted" is such a simple concept even I can accurately translate it into simple Hindi. Hindi has a word for scallop, "strange creature" not needed, he could always have just left it as "scallop" - as he did for "walrus".

But throwing in another extraneous anachronistic reference "Guinness Book of Records", once again simply transliterated into devanagari characters, is Picard level facepalm material. I'm only halfway through, but it's going to be hard work finishing this, as much as I was looking forward to reaching rikki-tikki-tavi.

[db105]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

Returning to the translation that triggered this thread, the translator has done it again. Kipling's words from The White Seal:

That Hindi translation is rather unfaithful.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by db105

That Hindi translation is rather unfaithful.

Yes, in the same way the Sun is rather warm.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by db105

That Hindi translation is rather unfaithful.

/me puts on Muppet heckler voice.
"It's terrible."

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

Yes, in the same way the Sun is rather warm.

How's your Hindi Robin? Surely ANYONE that can read English and write Hindi decently can do better.

Though I know people bilingual with English-German, English-Irish and English-something and none would dream of translating books. It is a lot of work. But I've read a good handful of Kipling and have loads on my TBR pile (ebook and paper editions older than 1906) and that seems excruciating.

Worse than Disney novelizations of their animations of Kipling and fairy stories. Disney books ought to be limited to the USA, or something.

[Quoth]

This is the last one I read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewards_and_Fairies
I used the text from gutenberg.org as I don't have any paper editions that late!

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by Quoth

How's your Hindi Robin? Surely ANYONE that can read English and write Hindi decently can do better.

I'm tempted, now! I bought the book 3 years ago as one of my very first Kobo purchases, after having hunted for a Hindi version for a long time. The translator says in his foreword that the absence of ANY translation was spur to his, so I started it thinking it would be a good way to broaden my vocab and improve my reading comprehension. It never occurred to me that the book I was reading would not be the one Kipling wrote.