Pym / Understanding China through translation- Peaches and plums do not speak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIExDcS6mYQ
A talk by Anthony Pym at the 3rd East Asian Translation Studies Conference, Venice, June 29, 2019.
桃李不言 下自成蹊
3 options
1. “Peaches and Plums need not speak, (and yet) below (them) a path naturally forms.”
2. “Action speaks louder than words.”
3. “The initiative receives overwhelming international support.”
questionnaire respondents, official translators, Chinese first year undergraduates in Australia, Australian first year undergraduates
factors involved: translator under the pressure of authority, literal to avoid risks, to avoid misinterpret a high level official’s words
cultural — risks of being misinterpreted, as “shade the plum and peach trees provide”
“peach and plum” hot sexy women?
risks of cultural meaning loss
individual’s tolerance of ambiguity: would you like to go to a party with a lot of strangers present
Tolerance of ambiguity
positive correlations with openness, extraversion, self-efficacy
negative correlation with anxiety and perfectionism
Higher level of tolerance of ambiguity: indicating better language learning abilities, a certain kind of creativity
Translators should have high level of tolerance of ambiguity:
直接推 experts have higher level of tolerance of ambiguity than novices, learn to better deal with and live with ambiguity.
YET 实验结果相反
另外一个实验 years of experience <> personality trait: less open to experience
但 years of experience <> more likely to take risks
常年winging it?
Readers are more prepared to go into the details of ambiguity yet translators are good at settling on one idea and push it and sell it
That’s why some readers don’t like option two as it seems too easy, too unChinese.
Pym's sidenote: translation is intrumental in intercultural communication. By choosing to translate in one way or another, they wield an enormous power of making the communication interesting or boring.
Mine: I would hate that 桃李不言下自成蹊 were translated into Action speaks louder than words as it is expedient yet inherently lazy and in the long run, harmful to both cultures.
A sidenote: from a video comment
the first option is deemed as “literal translation” while it’s not as literal as Pym described.
Literal lexical translation : This is the traditional word for word translation which ignores the realties of syntax, semantics and pragmatics.
Literal syntactical translation : This focuses on the grammatical reality above words (phrases, clauses, tense, transitivity etc.)
Literal semantic translation : This is the translation I gave above with the implied semantic meaning enclosed in brackets.
These various types of literal translations are not mutually exclusive, they can co-occur.
Mine: The metaphor used is not that incomprehensible to an Australian, is it?
