1. Bellos spends quite a bit of time dwelling on the base paradox of "selective foreignism". As a reader, what is is that drives you to read foreign/translated works? Would you rather a work 'feel foreign', even if it would not feel that way to a reader in the native tongue?
2. Bellos asserts that it is easiest to translate between languages which are already closely interrelated, like English and French, as readers will have some innate understanding of the original. How different do you feel it is to translate from one of these related languages as opposed to from Japanese, a language the typical western reader has little knowledge of?
3. What, in your opinion, is the best way to avoid "ethnocentric violence" in your own translations?
1. I mean when I'm reading I tend to read a book based on its content so it doesn't really matter to me whether it is foreign or not. Sometimes good review and fame drive me to read these works as well. I would expect the work to feel foreign since it is a translated foreign book. The sense of feeling foreign actually helps me to realize that this work is from a different culture which might explain some of my confusions regarding to different perspectives during the process of reading.
ReplyDelete2. I have zero experience with translating English into another western language so I can't speak for that. However, as a Chinese speaker (haha) I think I've encounter this similar issue a lot during this semester. Chinese and Japanese are closer related to each other (just in my opinion!) than English and Japanese which sometimes makes it easier for me to translate the Japanese text into Chinese first and then combine them into English translation. The similarity doesn't just come from the Kanji which we share but also from the way how sentences are structured and tones are sound similarly in the two languages. So I think it is true that translating two closer related languages is easier in a sense comparing to two farther related/non-related languages.
3. I would just be faithful to the original work. Try my best to eliminate confusions but aiming for the best outcome for my readers to get as close as they can get to the original work in their languages.