Translated by Tom Moore
1 © Paulo Rónai’s text by Cora Tausz Rónai and Laura Tausz Rónai – Rights granted by Solombra Books. Paulo Rónai (1907-1992) was an eminent Brazilian translator, professor, and writer. He was the author of several books, including ‘Como Aprendi o Português e Outras Aventuras‘ and ‘A Tradução Vivida‘.
Adapted from a lecture delivered at the Dept. of Letters, Federal University of Paraná
Prosper Merimée, the great French storyteller, author of ‘Carmen’ and ‘Colomba’, among other classic works, was also a translator of exceptional merit. He was the first to bring the Russian authors to the French reading public, and thus responsible for the dissemination of their works throughout the West. A witty and ironic man, he had adopted as motto for his private life the Greek adage “Remember to be suspicious”. We can ask to borrow this saying as the translator’s slogan, since the most important quality required for his trade is a perpetual suspicion.
And this is because as a professional he spends his life tread- ing steep paths, set about on either side with precipices and paved with banana peels. This article will be dedicated to the identification of some of the latter. In reality, their number is legion, for, as we will see, there is no word, no matter how simple, which may not be harbouring, in particular circumstances, some ambiguity, and thus be transformed into a dangerous trap.
Don’t expect a theory of translation with definitions and fixed rules from me. Even if they could be formulated, they would teach us little about the actual process of translation. If you ask me what red is, I would be able to give the exact measure in microns of the wavelength which produces this color, and even so you would not see it; but if I should say to you that it is the color of blood and of fire, or were simply to show you a poppy, your curiosity would be satisfied.
Naturally, if a blind man were to ask the question there would be no way to satisfy him. I consider blind in the area of translation the person who is indifferent to the subtleties of his own language, who does not normally seek the best manner of expressing himself, and who speaks and writes in a slapdash way; he naturally would never become a translator, even if his life depended on it.
I am a literary translator. But the phenomena we are looking at are of interest to all sorts of translators, since we all work with the same raw material, language — a mysterious, impalpable reality which surrounds us on all sides.
Taking it as a given that the translator should know his own language profoundly, a solid knowledge of the language which he is translating is another indispensable requirement. And this must be a grammatical and lexical knowledge, and as complete as possible.
As far as grammar is concerned, the aspiring translator will have all the irregular forms of the conjugation and all the unusual inflections of the declensions, the more so as they are not always listed alphabetically in dictionaries. He will be able to distinguish archaic from modern forms, slang from every- day forms, spoken from written forms. He will have an especially acute awareness of phenomena that do not exist in his own language.
If he is to translate from French, he ought to know thoroughly the tricks of the pronominal adverbs en and y; if from Italian, the difficult handling of the unstressed pronouns combined with the verb, as in scrivermela, facendoglisi, fateglielo; if from German, the distinction between verbs with a separable prefix, such as wiedersehen, zusammenkommen, from those without, such as übersetzen, beschreiben. All this seems as if it hardly needs saying, but there are so many heedless people who venture into translating without being deeply steeped in the grammatical rules of the target language that we judged this preliminary warning necessary.
As far as the lexicon is concerned, the first and principal source of confusion is in great part the fact that words possess various meanings. If they had simply one unique, well-determined meaning — as, for example, “pin”, “aspirin”, and “centimeter”, translation would be something that is relatively easy. But the majority of vocabulary used in everyday language has various meanings, listed and often numbered in dictionaries, and which can be quite far removed from each other.
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This phenomenon is called polysemy, and it can be found in every language. But, you will say to me, if the phenomenon is common to all languages, there is no reason for alarm. However, only in very rare cases do two corresponding words in two languages have the same senses, as for example French punaise and Portuguese percevejo, which both indicate a certain insect and a certain type of nail.
But the French noun prix, which corresponds to the English “price”, also has the sense of “prize”; or another noun, rapport, can signify both “report” and “rapport”. We need context in order to be able to understand them and translate them. Only after we read the complete phrase “le prix Nobel” (the Nobel Prize) do we know that it is a prize, and not until we have heard mention of the “rapport Kinsey” do we understand that one is thinking of a report.
Sometimes the context is much larger than a unique phrase or a simple expression. The translator who had to translate a French novel titled ‘Adresses’ would have to read at least a few pages of the volume in order to know if it was called “Addresses” or “Abilities”.
This last example shows that even words with the same origin in two languages can branch out in different directions. French maître (and English “master”) have the principal senses of Portuguese mestre, but they have in addition the sense of “master” in the context of “master-slave” or “master-servant”, a sense which is lacking in Portuguese.
So we can draw the conclusion that the meaning of a word is not contained only in the word itself, but comes from the words which surround it. An excellent proof of this is in the two German phrases “Er dient” and “Sie dient”, where the first is under- stood to mean “He is doing his military service” and the second “She works as a maid”.
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The difficulty caused by polysemy in other languages is paid back in the same coin when natives of these countries set about translating our Brazilian books. A Frenchman who had only a superficial knowledge of our vocabulary would be easily deceived when coming upon our word papagaio, as it not only designates the multi-colored bird (parrot), but the toy known as a kite. And even if he is not unaware of this meaning he will be up the creek without a paddle if he comes upon a story in which someone pays for a whole truckload of merchandise with a single papagaio, that is, a bank draft or promissory note.
One of the causes of polysemy is the tendency of our spirit towards metaphor, which can be noted in every language. It seems natural to call a child a cub, a beautiful woman a flower, or to speak of the leg of the table, the heart of the problem, the head of the mutiny. When the metaphor is so obvious that it exists in all languages, or even when it represents a new way of seeing, peculiar to the author, it can be translated with the greatest fidelity.
The difficulty begins when the metaphorical expression comes to be a stereotyped part of the language, transforming itself into a figure of speech. Someone who uses it in his own language no longer even notices the image that gave it birth; but the translator who, through ignorance, considers them individual creations, and re-establishes the image, would make a dreadful mistake. Let us take, for example, the German Handschuh (glove), made up of Hand and Schuh. The image of “shoe” does not even occur for a German; it would be absurd to translate it thus. This mistake is highly unlikely, since not only is it a very common word, but because the elements of the word are combined.
Whereas the French expression belle-mère (mother-in-law), belle-fille (daughter-in-law), beau-père (father-in-law), and beau-fils (son- in-law) are responsible for innumerable blunders, even though they are connected with a hyphen. The situation gets worse when the words that make up the expression are not even connected with a hyphen: thus tête de mort (death’s head, or skull), and tête de Turc (whipping-boy, the butt of a joke, though in English a Turk’s head is a sort of knot).
In English, there is “matchmaker”- not a match manufacturer, but one who arranges marriages; and “sleeping partner”, the secret partner in a business deal, who usually keeps his eyes wide open. Identifying these sorts of snares requires, in addition to good sense, lots of attention and sufficient experience.
One of the most curious cases is when the metaphor itself is used metaphorically. Those who know English well know that the expression “man-of-war” denotes a warship. The contributor to the Jornal do Brasil, who had to translate a story about an intrepid swimmer who was to swim from Cuba to the U.S., knew this as well; but he did not know that the expression “Portuguese man-of-war” was another metaphor turned name, and so describes a sea creature known to Brazilians as medusa or água–viva. And thus he was to bravely write that the sportsman would encounter serious difficulties, as those waters were infested by Portuguese warships, without noticing how absurd such a statement was. Here a little good sense would have advised the use of the dictionary.
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We can distinguish polysemic words from homonyms, pairs of words of identical appearance, but differing in meaning, which also give rise to many mistakes. Doubtless we have these in our own tongue, but there we get out of difficulty thanks to the context in which they appear. In Brazil, if our guest says during lunch that he will fazer uma sesta (take a nap), we know that he is going to snooze, rather than make a basket (fazer uma cesta). In a foreign language, however, we can get into trouble if we only know one of the homonyms, or if we do not understand the context.
When it is simply a case of two homophones, words with the same sound, but written differently, their appearance warns us: sceau (stamp), seau (bucket), and sot (fool) are recognizable and differentiable due to their spelling. But when it is a matter of homographs, words identical in form, errors are easier to make. For someone who does not know the French word nue, a rarer synonym of nuage, the expression tomber des nues will be a puzzle, since for him those letters only signify “nude”. The same is true with the word “mine”. If you only know this as the equivalent of “mine”, you will not understand when you are complimented on your good appearance: Vous avez bonne mine.
The translator from English will have similar surprises if he cannot distinguish between “pole” (North) and “pole” (rod), or between “pool” (of water) and “pool” (pot, in gambling).
We will mention another few pairs of homonyms which are responsible for a great deal of confusion: in French, feu (“fire” and “deceased”); in English, “light” (“of little weight”; “illumination”); in Spanish, pez (“fish”, if masculine; “pitch”, if feminine); in Italian, vita, (“life” and “waist”); in German, Weise (“wise” and “manner”). Indeed, in each one of these languages you would be able to make a list of dozens of these pairs of tricky words.
But this number is infinitely increased by the inattention or ignorance of translators. Magalhães Jr. cites a colleague who took “General Staff” for the name of a superior officer; and I myself have already found j’ai attrapé un rhume terrible translated by “I drank a horrible glass of rum”, due to the confusion between rhum (“rum”) and rhume (“cold”).
You might think that synonyms, at least, do not constitute a problem, but rather a help to the translator. It seems logical, in fact, in the cases in which we are not finding a satisfactory equivalent for a term, to look for the equivalent of one of its synonyms.
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At the same time synonyms, although they do not present a perceptible difference in meaning, generally correspond to different levels of language, so that they may not always be exchangeable. In comparing début and commencement, the first belongs more to the literary sphere, the second to oral usage; of j’ai entendu dire and j’ai ouï dire, the first is more modern than the second. In expressions, synonyms cannot be substituted one for another; in Portuguese one rompe-se com a namorada (breaks up with one’s girlfriend), but quebra-se a cara (breaks someone’s face). For another even more convincing example, Portuguese progenitora, a synonym of mãe (mother), but which in the majority of cases cannot be used without producing a smile.
Pascal used to say that there were passages where it was necessary to say Paris, and others where capitale du royaume was appropriate, an observation which is as important for the translator as for the writer. The question of synonyms is really a question of style, as Jules Renard knew well when he wrote “there are no synonyms; there are only the necessary words, and the good writer knows which they are.”
Much worse enemies for the translator are the so-called “false friends”, or deceptive cognates, that is, words with similar form in two languages, but differing in meaning. Frequently they are words from the same origin, but which in the course of evolution have assumed different meanings. Thus French jument is neither Portuguese jumento (donkey) nor jumenta (she-donkey), but égua (mare), French mater is not Portuguese matar (kill), but simply to mate in chess; French remarquer is not Portuguese remarcar (hallmark), but to observe or note.
More than once, however, the resemblance is sheer coincidence: stemming from different origins, the words were brought together by coincidence: stemming from different origins. It was due to the random phonetic and orthographic evolution of the respective languages that have made the words resemble each other: French fiel (gall) has nothing to do with Portuguese fiel (faithful), nor French cor (horn, or corn) with Portuguese cor (color).
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Worse are the false friends that are not always false: that is, they are equivalent in some senses, and not in others. An example of this is the English “intelligence”, which corresponds to Portuguese inteligência in the sense of “intellect”, but not in its sense of “information” (e.g. the Central Intelligence Agency); or “devout”, which sometimes can be Portuguese devoto, but also Portuguese entusiasmado.
Every translator will remember, from his own experience, some amusing example of the ill effects of false friends. Magalhães Jr. tells of a ‘translator’ who rendered éleveur de moutons (sheep raiser) by elevador de carneiros (sheep elevator). Julio Cortázar notes this find from a “Latin-American professional”: la vaca no habla (“the cow doesn’t speak”) as a translation of res non verba (“things, not words”).
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Interlegibility is the possibility of reading another language which one does not speak, which is the case for Brazilians with respect to Spanish. It is at the same time both a help and a danger. The similarity of the two languages frequently leads us to guess rather than interpret: if we were to go to the dictionary, we would know that Spanish crianza = Portugese criação (education), not criança (child), polvo is pó (powder), not polvo (octopus), ratito is momentinho (a moment), not a little mouse. Even when there is not such a chasm in meaning between these words which are identical in form, the current use of the two can differ substantially: and this is why many times we understand less of the Portuguese translation of a Spanish book than we would the original.
In this quick review, it should be understood, it is impossible to review all the sorts of pitfalls that the translator encounters in his professional activity. Even so, we cannot overlook the risks stemming from difference in cultural background. Every language is an archive of historical reminiscences, of allusions and events and characters from a common past, whose knowledge is indispensable for one who lets himself in for translating.
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When one says in Hungarian “Hátra van még a feketeleves” (“The black soup is still ahead”), speakers of this tongue understand that the worst is still to come. It was discovered that the sentence had been first uttered at the end of a banquet to which the Turkish sultan had invited some Hungarian nobles, in order to announce that coffee would be served, which was still without a name in Hungarian in the sixteenth century. But as the guest, soon after the coffee, were arrested and imprisoned, the utterance earned a tragic connotation.
Fragments of culture preserved in the language do not always have this historical halo: they can be the simple reflections of common habits of day-to-day life. There existed in Paris an ultra-rapid system of communication, by which letters written on onionskin were sent through tubes by means of compressed air from one neighborhood to another. Such a missive was given the name lettre pneumatique, shortened to pneu. The translator unaware of such an institution would not understand why a certain character in a novel, who didn’t even own an automobile, would be given a tire. His surprise would be no less learning of a schoolboy, who being promoted, moved from the fifth to the fourth grade — since in France the grades are numbered in reverse order.
Or in reading, a story by a Hungarian author, that a peasant woman put on her skirts to go out, the jejune translator, judging that the problem was an evident typographical error, would change the plural to the singular — since he would not know that it is the custom of Magyar peasant girls, especially on feast days, to wear at once all the dresses that they own.
These minutiae help us to understand that translating is much more than simply replacing the words of one language for those of another; it is establishing a series of contacts between two cultures, two realities, without a keen knowledge of which the act of translation is doomed to failure. They also demonstrate that the translator cannot be an uncultivated person, with limited horizons; he has to be someone with an ever-lively curiosity, since ignorance of the environment of the original does not constitute an attenuating circumstance, just as ignorance of the law does not exempt the malfeasor from blame.
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We will mention now proper names. These, at least, should not bring complications for the translator. But, here as well, appearances are deceiving.
As far as translating personal names is concerned, there are more practices than rules. Italians, for example, translate everyone’s forename and speak of Pietro Corneille and Onorato de Balzac; the Spanish do the same and speak of Juan La Fontaine, which seems highly ridiculous to us. Nevertheless, when it is a matter of fictitious characters, the custom is to translate them in Brazil as well. More recently the tendency is to leave both intact.
In the majority of languages there are affectionate forms of personal names, called hypochoristics. Robert is familiarly called Bobby in the U.S., Giuseppe Beppe in Italy, Aleksandr Sacha in Russia.
The translator must notice when in a work a character is designated by two or more names; he must not mistake the sex of the male characters, whose hypochoristics end in –a, such as Valia, Volodia and Duma (in place of Valentin, Vladimir and Dmitri). He should respect Russian usage of employing the person’s forename and the patronymic in respectful speech: Ivan Ivanovich.
He should also know that in certain languages transcription noticeably changes the form of the names: Heine becomes Geine in Russian, Homer Gomero, and Theocritus Feocrit. He cannot ignore the fact that names from Greco-Latin antiquity have different forms in the various modern languages: in Italian, for example, Jupiter is Giove and Juvenal Giovenale.
A curious case is that in which proper names are employed to represent common names: Tom, Dick and Harry are Fulano, Sicrano and Beltrano in Portuguese, Tizio, Caio and Sempronio in Italian; reduced to only two in German, Hinz and Kunz; and in French, to one, M. Untel.
One might thing that numerals must present no problems. Another mistake. In the land of translation half can equal one, and four equal six. While the Brazilian refers to a man de meio olho or meio perna (half an eye, half a leg), English refers to a one-eyed or one-legged man. There is much diversity in the area of indeterminate quantities: a boy who does whatever he wants in France has 36,000 whims (faire ses trente-six mille volontés). Portuguese has a clear preference for seven: one speaks of a cat with seven breaths, a man with seven instruments, something locked with seven keys. It often happens that a foreign figure of speech using numerals is translated into another with no allusion whatsoever to numbers: se mettre sur son trente et un is simply to put on one’s Sunday best. As can be seen, we must always be careful in this area as well.
He would be mistaken, finally, who might judge that one only translates language, that is, words. There are many other elements, in addition to words, which contribute to the meaning of a text: the order of the words, the use of capitals and lowercase, the choice of the typeface, even the arrangement of the blank spaces. One needs to know the conventions that regulate the use of all these ingredients, which can differ from one language to another.
As far as the placement of the words, their order in a Latin sentence can vary to infinity, but each different order corresponds to a different nuance of thought. Whereas in French the word order is generally rigid and has thus no influence on the meaning of the whole. But there are exceptions, especially in the case of qualifying adjectives which change in meaning or connotation depending on their placement before or after the noun: we recall un homme bon and un bonhomme, mon propre cahier and un cahier propre, un sacré farceur and un devoir sacré.
Differences in the use of upper and lower case can also be noted. In the Romance languages, to begin a noun with an uppercase letter is a sign of emphasis; in German it is a grammatical obligation. In English it is normal to write the personal pronoun in the first person with a capital; in other languages it would be a sign of megalomania.
In Brazil the dash opens and closes characters’ speeches, while in England this function is served by quotation marks, and the dash represents suspense or shock.
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In conclusion: every element, even non-verbal ones, on a page contributes to the message, and for this reason must not be neglected.
We have arrived at the end of our reflections. Translation one learns by translating. The craftsmen of earlier days were trained as apprentices by their master’s side, with whom they spent long years. It is very difficult to find a master translator who accepts apprentices. Courses in translation teach the basic and indispensable tools of the trade, but how to do it is the object of an individual apprenticeship. Each translator ought to be his own master.
He himself should invent his own exercises, compare an original with some printed translation, compare his own translation with one of these versions, juxtapose two or more versions of the same text, put together his own lists of false friends, of idiomatic expressions, of syntactic equivalents. One must resign oneself to doing these unpaid exercises before daring to do paid translations. The Horatian motto — Multa tulit fecitque puer, sudavit et alsit (“A youth must do and bear much, and sweat and shiver”) — is particularly applicable to the translator.
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