November 2, 2003
Common sense must be respected
The Guardian has an excerpt of Umberto Eco's new book on translation, Mouse or Rat? It sounds sober enough:
In the course of my experiences as a translated author I have always been torn between the need to have a translation that respected my intentions, and the exciting discovery that my text could elicit unexpected interpretations and be in some way improved when it was re-embodied in another language.Language Hat got the link from Gail Armstrong, who's also gathered up some comments about about the new collective translation of Proust. The response is mostly positive, but I'll probably buy Edith Grossman's new Don Quixote first... Carlos Fuentes has an ecstatic review in today's Times, and I've been dying to reread DQ anyway.What I want to emphasise is that many concepts circulating in translation studies (such as adequacy, equivalence, faithfulness) can also be considered from the point of view of negotiation. Negotiation is a process by virtue of which, in order to get something, each party renounces something else, and at the end everybody feels satisfied since one cannot have everything.
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