I used to assume that a translation that reads too smoothly might lose something of the original culture, while keeping unfamiliar sentence structures, expressions, and foreign words was a way of respecting the original. But Bellos made me realize that foreignness may not be something inherent in the original. It may actually be created through translation.
What struck me most was Bellos’s discussion of Kafka. To German readers, Kafka is not someone speaking English with a German accent. He is simply writing in his own language. So if a translator deliberately uses awkward English to make Kafka sound more “German,” does that foreignness really come from Kafka, or from English readers’ ideas of what German sounds like? I began to wonder whether what we call faithfulness to a foreign culture is sometimes just faithfulness to our own stereotypes about it.
This also made me think about last week’s news translation assignment. I restructured many long Japanese sentences and simplified some expressions to make them sound more natural in English news writing. At the time, I was simply trying to follow the direct style of English journalism. But after reading Bellos, I see those choices differently. If a news article sounds natural and clear to Japanese readers, wouldn't translating it into awkward, complicated English just to preserve the Japanese style (foreignness) actually distort the original reading experience? Maybe making a translation sound more natural doesn't necessarily mean being less faithful. Sometimes, it can be another way of staying true to the original.
Bellos made me aware that the real question is not whether to choose domestication or foreignization, but how to tell which kinds of foreignness belong to the original and which are created through translation.
Mingzi
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