Gained in Translation
By Andrew Horvat
 

Among reasons for learning Japanese, a famous American Japanologist once included the opportunity to read works of European literature in translation. The scholar suggested that by learning Japanese, Americans could have access to the enormous numbers of European literary works that have been translated into Japanese.

Be that as it may, there would seem to be quite a few reasons for learning French and not Japanese in order to catch the real flavor of, say Albert Camus. First of all, according to a grading system devised by the US State Department, the average native speaker of English can learn French in less than half the time it would take to master Japanese.

A more important reason for staying away from literature in translation is the frequency of mistranslations into Japanese. Although the quality of translation is improving, misrenderings into Japanese abound at all levels. And finally, foreign literature often undergoes some unexpected changes as it enters the realm of expectations of a Japanese readership.

Not long ago, one of Japan's most famous translators, Takao Tokuoka, (who rendered Lee Iacocca's autobiography into Japanese and translated several of historian John Toland's books) recalled being asked to check the work of a colleague. The piece was an essay originally written in English by an American writer about the victorious entry into Kyoto of 16th century warlord, Oda Nobunaga.

"Everything seemed OK," said Tokuoka, "Until I came across a passage in the Japanese translation in which Nobunaga is described as wearing medals and throwing furniture all over the place while he is walking down the streets of Kyoto."

Tokuoka checked the English original. The sentence read: "Nobunaga, who had decorated himself for the occasion, threw out his chest as he walked down the streets of Kyoto."

The problem was two-fold. The original translator mistook "decorated himself" to mean he had put on military medals (not in use in Japan at the time of Oda Nobunaga), and he had assumed that "throwing out one's chest" had something to do with getting rid of old chests of drawers. (Incidentally, Nobunaga had probably decorated himself in fancy kimono, which were expensive symbols of wealth and power.)

The above incident might be dismissed as a funny story were it not for the fact that mistranslation between English and Japanese is a daily occurrence. An American writer who has worked as a movie reviewer in Tokyo for many years says he used to come across about two or three "whoppers" in almost every foreign movie he reviewed. In one American film shown in Japan, the subtitles have an undercover cop saying to a female drug addict, "If you tell me who did it, I'll give you a kiss." The original English had been: "If you tell me who did it, I'll let you have some smack."

In another movie, "AA meeting" was translated as a session of the Anti-American activities committee of the US Congress. The correct reference had been Alcoholics Anonymous.

Of course, mistranslations go in both directions and there is no shortage of mistakes in the early works of many now famous foreign scholars of Japanese literature. But the fact is that the volume of translation from English to Japanese is far greater than the other way around. Moreover, translators are not normally well-paid.

The results are entirely predictable. About ten years ago, I had been asked to write an essay on my birthplace, Budapest, for a Japanese magazine. As the piece was long, I opted to write in English and check for mistakes in Japanese. Sure enough, I came across passages I had no recollection of writing in English. I did recall having written: "Budapest is divided into two parts by the Danube. From the Pest bank, one can see the hills of Buda."

In Japanese, the last sentence emerged as, "From the Bank of Pest, one can see the hills of Buda." The translator had not been able to understand that banks are not only financial institutions but embankments of rivers as well.

Later I contributed a piece to another magazine about the lives of my parents during World War II. In the Japanese galley- proofs the sentence, "My parents survived on false papers," emerged as "My parents made a living selling false papers." A translator unfamiliar with the sad history of Europe in this century turned my persecuted parents into criminals.

Great works of literature do not seem to fare much better than my articles. In an earlier column in this paper I mentioned the case of a missing line from Midsummer Night's Dream ("the rest I leave to you to be translated"), mysteriously unrendered into Japanese, probably because it was too difficult. Then there is the case of the translation of Camus' "L'Etranger" in which printed next to the character for mother (haha) in the first line are the katakana phonetic symbols for "maman" so as to leave no doubt in the minds of Japanese readers that the mother who dies and on the occasion of whose death the anti-hero Mersault seems unable to summon any real emotion, is a French mother.

It is safe to assume that the last thing on Camus' mind was to stress Mersault's mother's Frenchness. Far from it. Camus was writing about the sense of alienation that was plaguing a whole generation of Europeans (and others) in the period after World War II. Though "maman" in katakana may not be a mistranslation, it does represent a misrendering of the original.

In spite of the above examples, there is reason to believe that Japanese translations will undergo a rapid improvement in the very near future. Cheap air travel and a relatively strong yen have made it possible for Japanese translators of foreign languages to go abroad and spend time with real foreigners. Acquaintance with the spoken language of the countries they visit, will, in all likelihood, give translators a chance to pick up the nuances they previously missed.

The growing number of foreign speakers of Japanese will also help cut down on mistranslations. It is now common for translators of important documents to work in teams and for bilingual native speakers of English to check the work of bilingual speakers of Japanese.

Still, it was not long ago that a simultaneous interpreter, a graduate of the Monterey Language Institute, complained privately that companies begrudge the Y60,000 per day they pay her. Clearly, an executive has to have some competence in a foreign language to understand that the publisher who paid for translator Tokuoka to remove the furniture from the streets of Kyoto got every cent's worth of Tokuoka's fees.