11/8 Readings

Hibbett's speech helped me realize how personal the art of translation is. Many translators have an very strong relationship with the original author's they are translating (if they are alive), or at least a deep understanding of not only their work, but their life, education, personality, and beyond. I had not really thought about this previously but it is logical, especially since translators are recreating an author's work with the utmost effort to remain true to it's original essence. Embodying the author and having a profound understanding of who they are would definitely support their ability to produce a more accurate translation. On the other hand, this is why I believe it is also important to have a deep understanding of both of the cultures involved in the translating process, but especially the one of the language you are translating a text into. By catching certain nuances that an ordinary reader may miss, the translator is able to convey and reframe an element of the text that may not come across the right way otherwise. Knowing the author, the cultural context of the text, and the audience that will be consuming the work is highly important.

Unrelated to the above point, I found the following quote interesting: "in the United States, where we have an academic cultural criticism that questions all sorts of established views". This idea speaks to the importance of freedom of speech, diversity, and individuality. If one small group determines what is deemed to be significant, and people are afraid to say otherwise, we lose out on the sharing and challenging of ideas. There is value in being allowed to question "established views" and have a minority opinion, as this creates discussion and allows for growth.

An interesting point in Copeland's article was the following "I wanted to create a perfect equivalent of Shiga’s piece in English—the perfect translation. I was naïve". This speaks to the argument that translation is not a science but an art. No two pieces of work are the same in different languages because of the fundamental differences carried by language, including grammar and sentence structure, but also cultural nuances. There is never really a "universal translation" of a work of writing, because it would be impossible to create a "perfect translation" that satisfied everyone's needs and desires. Every translator has a different understanding of the author, the text, the original culture, the culture of the language the work is being translated into, the audience, and many other minute factors that we do not think about. Additionally, one language may have regional variations, and language itself may evolve over time and outgrow old translations. Considering all of these factors, it is crucial to keep an open mind and remain aware that one's translation of a work is simply one interpretation of the original.

Emma

Book Covers

    I do agree that physical books have gotten more flashy since e-books starting becoming more popular. I had noticed the shift, but just figured it was a trend, but I think it's an interesting comparison to bring up. 

However, I don't think it's an entirely necessary change to be made. Yes, e-books have been getting a lot of praise recently, but I believe there will always be a market for physical media. I can attest to this as someone who enjoys annotating physical books. I personally don't get as much enjoyment from reading digital books because I feel like it robs you of the full experience of reading (i.e. holding the book, turning the page, and seeing your physical progress). It's similar to the way that we have countless streaming platforms and we have a huge collection of music accessible to us for a monthly subscription, yet people still buy and listen to vinyl records and CDs. 

Then, there's the issue of pricing. If their goal is to compete with e-books, then more extravagant book covers feels pretty counterproductive. Those intricate designs usually drive the price of physical books (especially hardcover) way up. Physical books are already more expensive than e-books, making it less desirable to the unbiased consumer, so how could hiking up the price possibly help?

And all of this is also happening while AI is getting increasingly incorporated into everything we produce and consume. It honestly all feels like a money grab, because what I'm seeing right now in the book industry is hiked up prices on books with fancy embellishments on the cover. However, the chances of those coming from an actual artist are becoming lower and lower. If so many publishers are using AI on their covers, then how come the prices are getting higher? They are "saving money" by having a computer generate a cover for them, but not using that lowered production cost to reduce the price of the product.

Madison

11/2 Form VS Content

The article emphasizes how publishers are using more elaborate and beautiful designs to keep physical books competitive in the age of e-books. Its argument seems to be that the more beautiful a book becomes, the more valuable it becomes as a physical object. However, Chip Kidd seems to suggest that book cover design is not always about beauty in the traditional sense. For example, when designing the cover of Dry, he deliberately made the text look as though it had been damaged by water, reflecting the chaos the protagonist's struggle with alcoholism. The cover may not be conventionally beautiful, but it succeeds because of its imperfection.

This makes me wonder whether the value of a physical book comes not necessarily from how beautiful it looks, but from how deeply its form connects with its content. As Kidd suggests, once a book designer reads the story, they become a translator. A designer translates a written story and its emotional experience into a visual narrative, just as a literary translator tries to recreate the experience of the original work for a new audience. The cover is no longer merely decoration but becomes an extension of the content, a “haiku summary” of the story, using a few carefully chosen visual elements to give readers a glimpse of the narrative and invite them to imagine the world within.

Kidd argues that book designers use form to express content while carefully maintaining a balance between the two. But if publishers simply add gold covers, expensive paper, and elaborate printing techniques to increase a book's price, without considering how these elements relate to the story itself, does that beauty become nothing more than another marketing strategy?

Mingzi

Face of the Book

Bosman discusses how making print books worth collecting can encourage readers to choose them over e-books. One example is 1Q84, which comes “wrapped in a translucent jacket with the arresting gaze of a young woman peering through.” The translucent material gives the book a sense of mystery. Bosman notes that the hardcover had sold 95,000 copies, compared with 28,000 e-book copies. Maybe the design had something to do with that. As Julian Barnes puts it at the end of the article, “it has to look like something worth buying and worth keeping.” I found a photo of the book design online:

I completely agree with this idea. But browsing bookstores in the U.S. feels different from browsing bookstores in China. I don’t know if it’s a matter of taste or different target audiences, but honestly, I find a lot of American book covers pretty ugly. I rarely see a cover that makes me want to own the book just for its design. And when I do, it usually costs a ridiculous amount.

I’m all for putting thought into book covers, but I really dislike belly bands, those strips of paper wrapped around books. I see them a lot on books published in China, and they always get in the way when I’m reading, although I do end up using them as bookmarks. They’re often covered with blurbs, awards, sales figures, and endorsements from famous people, telling you how worth reading the book is before you’ve even opened it. Sometimes they cover up the actual cover design, and they slide around or get bent while you’re holding the book. Even when the cover is beautiful, that extra strip can feel unnecessary, unless there’s an actual design idea behind it.

Chip Kidd’s TED Talk was really funny. I loved his question, “What do stories look like?” He’s so creative, and the way he talks about design makes it sound as simple and playful as a game. I especially liked his comparison of a book cover to a haiku of the story. Designing the covers of a comics series so they connect to form a larger image is such a clever idea. It would definitely make people want to collect the whole set. I also liked his idea that a book designer is a kind of translator, turning the written content into something visual. 

Kerry

Covers

     I'm gonna be a bit of a contrarian and say that while I love physical books and would own many more if I were settled down, I honestly don't care much for covers. I can definitely appreciate a good cover or well-designed art, but I can't say it affects my interest in a book's contents much. I'm not sure whether that's more of a personal experience, since I don't tend to be greatly moved by exceptional design in general. Maybe the typical book buyer pays more attention to covers than I do. Listening to Kidd talk about the process behind some of his work was entertaining, but I'm not sure it was especially interesting (apart from maybe learning that this guy created the Jurassic Park logo).

    As an aside, I was a bit bothered that Bosman didn't tell us what an endpaper is in the second paragraph, only to explain it later. I'd already looked it up by then :(

winter

Book Covers

 The only thought coming out of these two was just that I understand the assessment. Especially with the internet and how media seems to be shifting into shorter spans of information, it only makes sense that book covers would need to adapt to the new atmosphere. The video was definitely where the idea stemmed from, being published 14 years ago, and there is a line between the thoughts of the speaker and Bosman’s observations now. I’m just unsure of how much of a difference it will make. I do agree that these changes in books and their first impression will draw more attention than they have been, but that relies on people coming across them in the first place. With all the other options to spend your attention on, it feels as if one would have to seek out books with the intention to discover these new covers rather than just happen upon them. Then again, there is a reason that books have remained for so long. Perhaps these new covers can help a new audience discover, or rediscover, books. I’m not really sure what conclusions to draw from this, but it’s interesting at the very least. 

Avi

Book Covers and Art

I find it really interesting that the strategy behind creating artistic and appealing book covers was a result of the rising and competing popularity of e-books. This idea of physical beauty becoming more important to the consumer really made me think of the effects of AI on other art forms. While AI provides us with convenience on a scale never known before, gradually, people are getting sick of it. Personally, I hate seeing AI commercials and flyers. I have definitely noticed an uptick of the public preferring work that is uniquely and obviously human, whether through its creative direction or physical qualities or something that obviously demonstrates some kind of process. Just recently, Studio Laika released a new claymation film and Prada produced a commercial that was almost entirely animated by hand. Certainly, I imagine this is the case for book covers in this modern age, too. I am certainly drawn to books that are aesthetically pleasing and are more unique and thought-provoking. For instance, I recently purchased these books by Clarice Lispector (a Brazilian novelist) because I liked the continuity across the all of her novels' covers. Anyway, I hope this trend through book covers and art in general continues.

Kenna

This is what the covers of Lispector's novels look like. 

Book Covers

 Melissa

First of all, I'm obsessed with Chip Kidd's overall vibe, his slanted glasses and skanky mic.

"Don't judge a book by its cover"

This is a phrase that has been uttered over and over. But, in reality, in a time of fast-paced content and instant gratification, most people really are only judging a book by its cover. I was buying a book for class, a copy of Sanshiro, and I spent $10 extra to get a "prettier" copy. It's the same content, but I liked the cover better. And that's a book I knew the contents of. When choosing a book, I am drawn to the work that went into the cover. The details of the story seep out onto the cover, drawing you in. Some may think it's tacky or wasteful, but it works, doesn't it? I prefer a physical book to reading online; I always have. But I am picky even in my physical books. If the cover bores me, so will the book. That type of thinking isn't correct, but it's just a weird passive thought I receive when seeing a white cover with words scribbled on the front. Like the Audrey Hepburn book shown in the TED Talk. I understand his thoughts on not wanting to hand-feed the audience the meaning of the book through the cover, but I think a book featuring a real person should show the person on the cover.

I'm against the idea that there are only words or only a picture. In that case, come up with a cover that refers to a key factor in the book without it being the same as the cover. Kidd was inspired by dino bones to make a cover for Jurassic park. If it were me, I would perhaps feature a muddy dino footprint. The climax of the first Jurassic Park does happen in a chase between a T-rex and a car of people desperately trying to escape in the rain. You can tell the book is about dinosaurs with either cover, but one conveys them in the past while the other brings the threat to the present.

I brought my friend visiting from Japan to Barnes & Noble. She wanted to get a classic book. She looked at old famous fiction and horror. She landed on a collection of Edgar Allen Poe's works. The cover was Black with red carvings and an image of Poe in the center. It was creepy and dark, much like Poe's works. That cover was beautiful and stuck out amongst the many other books we were looking at. And, despite the heavier price, it was the book my friend chose. 

Physical books are becoming things to collect more and more as technology advances. So, what's the harm in dressing them up to catch someone's eye? Most of my personal collection is pretty, with colors and special features justifying a higher ticket.

D. Bellos, “Fictions of the Foreign”

Melissa: I posted this on the wrong blog last week whoops

    This reading was very interesting. The idea of the level of foreignness to leave in a translated body of text. Do we leave it foreign, or do we acclimate it to the group we are translating for? In the reading, Bellos mentioned a bit about French. If we are reading about a French detective, shouldn't they sound French?

    French and English are very close languages linguistically. A lot of people have a basic knowledge of stereotypical French phrases. So, if written in the original French, that could be something that is left untranslated in English in order to reintroduce the foreign nature of the text. The same could be said with other common phrases in German or Spanish too. But what about Japanese? A language so far removed from English is not so easily relatable to an English speaker. Where is the line for allowing foreignness in a Japanese-to-English translation?

    In class, we have also discussed this dilemma. This often comes up in idioms or filler words that exist in Japanese but not in English. Names and organizations, too, are unfamiliar to a non-Japanese reader. In this case, I have my own opinions on what to do. For idioms, I often search the meaning and try to find an English equivalent amongst English idioms. I want the rhythm and charm of the idiom to stay, but recognize a change must be made in order for the reader to understand the meaning. I hesitate with Names and Organizations. There is an urge to explain when translating Japanese. The language carries so much meaning in so few words. But I think it's important to remember that the reader can choose to look something up. I am pro footnotes. When we translated a short story a few weeks ago, we debating the name of a postal service included in the original text. I chose to omit it because I didn't think it bore significance to the text. If it had, however, I would have chosen to keep the name and write a footnote about it being a large postal service commonly known in Japan. I don't want to baby the audience. If they would like to know what something is, and the source text doesn't explain it, then I think a better alternative is to leave explanations in the back. This keeps the foreigness of the source text. 

    While Bellos talked about phrases and such to bring out foreigness of a text, I think his thoughts apply to how we deal with names in Japanese translation. Of course it depends on the significance the world plays in the text. Too many foreign organizations or shop names may be a little too confusing but generally I vote keep the name, add a footnote later.  

Respect to Book/Book Cover Designers

I was kind of surprised by the fact that the cover designers actually read the book and consider themselves "interpreters and translators." I kind of assumed designers got like a short summary of the plot and worked off of that because sometimes I don't like or understand the covers. The story of the Ottoman-court-painter-murder book being instilled into the experience of taking it out of the shelf surprised me because if I saw that cover I would probably think that it is just ugly and weird, so the talk made me want to appreciate covers more. I didn't really have any special respect for the profession before this Ted Talk.

I was also surprised by how much creativity went into the book jacket (e.g. for 1Q84). I feel like in my experience I remember being disappointed when I read hardcovers as a kid and took off the jacket because there was usually plain nothingness underneath. It made me want to read with the jacket on but of course that is a bit unpleasant. Also like all tankobons and in general Japanese books tend to not do anything with the jacket, I feel like.

I do remember this being one of my favorite book covers as a kid. The character pictured is recognizably the main character, who had been MIA up until this book. So seeing him again is a surprise that makes you want to read the book, and just look at it - he is in a crazy situation, which turns out to be one of the most climactic scenes in the book. So reading it and coming across the scene, and realizing "oh this is what the cover is!" and getting treated to a special visualization of what you are reading is a really fun experience.

Also this massive hardcover Nausicaa manga edition with beautiful cover designs. They made me want to buy them right away. Big beautiful books that look good on the shelf definitely inspire me strongly to purchase a book. I have so many of these sitting on my shelf that I haven't gotten to yet.

Joey

Book covers

Although we are told to not judge a book by its cover when we are kids, the literal sense of the phrase is near impossible in my opinion. From personal experience, I have gravitated towards books that look more intriguing. A cover sets the tone for the story before the reader even gets to page 1. I really loved the examples shown in the TED talk that really emphasize this concept. Although I might not have immediately understood the message, with Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, the stare of the woman through the layers of the cover make her seem trapped. If I saw it in the bookstore knowing nothing, I would at the very least be tempted to pick it up and read more. 

It was fascinating to hear Chip Kidd compare to book cover design to translation. In a lot of ways, I agree that the methodology of coming up with a cover relate to some of the strategies we have learned about translating. Specifically, when it comes to the approach of really understanding and appreciating a text before attempting a translation. Kidd mentioned how in all of his books, he tried to understand the point, perspective, and journey of the characters before deciding how to design the cover. I think these concepts are very well applicable to translation as well.

Tori