AQUILA
Lost in translation?
A
together in tunnels that twist lots of ways.” On an immediate level, Jack’s narration poses a problem for grammatically gendered languages that categorise the noun labyrinth as masculine, for example French (le Labyrinthe). In French, it would be impossible to maintain Donoghue’s prose, as the masculine noun ‘labyrinth’ would have to take the masculine pronoun ‘he’ (il) as opposed to the pronoun ‘she’ used in Jack’s original narration. However, on a deeper level, the normality of gendering objects in languages such as French, Spanish and German, takes away some of the strangeness of Jack’s development that Donoghue aims to convey. Whereas a reader of the English text would see that Jack’s lack of exposure to the outside world has caused him to develop a more than usual connection to the objects around him, personifying them due to a lack of his human contact, this element of the book is missing for readers in languages that naturally personify and gender objects on a daily basis. Some of the intrinsic meaning of the source material has been lost in the 0.3% margin of error.
ll 15cm rulers are manufactured with a tolerance of error for 0.5 millimetres, meaning that when you measure the side of a triangle with your ruler, there will always be that 0.5mm (0.3%) difference between the scale of your ruler and the scale on the ruler belonging to the person sitting next to you. But what is 0.3% in the grand scheme of things? Does it really matter? Surely, such a small difference will not be significant enough to throw off your whole trigonometry calculation. This is what we call tolerance of error. An error so small that we can tolerate the inaccuracy without devastating impact on the final outcome. But are there times when this tiny discrepancy does make a huge difference, when that 0.3% margin of error drastically changes the end result? I would argue that when it comes to the translation of Literature, this margin of error can a have deep and profound impact on the meaning of the original source material. Some discrepancies of error in translation are harmless enough and merely serve to define something slightly more or less accurately than originally intended. For example, in Vietnamese, there is no way to distinguish between the colours of blue and green, both are known collectively as 青: ‘blue.’ Meanwhile, the Turkish language distinguishes between paternal aunts (hala) and maternal aunts (teyze), whereas no such specifying option exists in English. These differences fall inside the 0.3% tolerance of error, they may mean that reading a book in Vietnamese or in Turkish is slightly different from reading the same text in English, but this difference is so small that it can be tolerated: it doesn’t change the key values and intrinsic message of the text, just as tiny differences between the scale on your ruler and somebody else’s won’t change your final calculations.
Another example of the problems caused by grammatical genderization comes in that most famous of American novels: ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Harper Lee deliberately chooses an androgynous name for her protagonist,‘Scout’, and works hard to confuse her reader as to Scout’s gender:“I swear Scout, sometimes you act so much like a girl, it’s mortifyin.’” Scout’s gender does not begin to be truly defined until the visit of her Aunt Alexandra, who takes on the mission of transforming her into a ‘girl’, encouraging her to wear dresses and to drink tea with other women. Scout’s discovery of her gender and transition into 1960s womanhood is one of the defining themes of Lee’s novel, and yet it is missing from some translations of the text. In the English version of the text, the reader completes the same journey as Scout herself, not knowing her gender in the early pages of the narrative, where it is left unspecified in Lee’s use of pronouns and prose, and then discovering it through the feminising dialogue of Aunt Alexandra. However, in a language such as Russian, concealing the gender of a person is grammatically impossible. This is because verbs, such as ‘bought’, change depending on the gender of the person who completed the action: ‘купил’ meaning bought when in reference to a male, and ‘купила’ when in reference to a female. Even if Lee tries
Yet there are cases where the translation of a text poses more significant problems in terms of maintaining the original meaning of the source material. One key example is the novel ‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue. This text is narrated by Jack, a boy who has grown up in a single room after his mother was abducted and imprisoned. For Jack, the objects in his room are the defining characters of his life and he personifies them as such. For example: “we’ve been making labyrinth since I was two, she’s all toilet rolls insides taped
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