Translation work is noble but not easy. The American writer of Russian origin, Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) once described three "sins', or mistakes, commonly made by translators.
The first is mistakes caused by lack of knowledge or understanding. This mistake, according to him, is forgivable. Many errors of the first type stem from negligence.
In every language there are what is called the "false helpers of a translator": a word whose form is similar to a foreign language word, but with a different meaning. For example, the word "professor" in German cannot be translated into English as "professor" because the German word means "head teacher".
The skill of finding the most accurate words is an important task in translation work. A translator must always perfect his knowledge of the language. I used to have a problem when translating Russian poetry into Malay. Luckily, I had a chance to show my translations to my Universiti Malaya colleagues and correct some mistakes.
But, sometimes an accurate translation is not desirable because it may be difficult to understand for readers with other cultures and even climates. For example, in the translation of the short story From the Lives of Millionaires by Victoria Tokareva, I replaced the word "September" with the word "autumn".
The word "September" does not give any special meaning to Malaysians because there are no seasons like in Europe. In the case for Europeans, September is like autumn and not only in nature but in human life as well (age around 50 years).
I encountered many difficulties in translating the novel Narrative of Ogonshoto by national laureate Anwar Ridhwan. For example, one of the episodes is about a man who cannot be considered a native of an island because his mother gave birth to him by shedding blood not on the island but on a ship not far at sea.
Here the author hints at the Malay phrase "tanah tumpah darah" which means "homeland". But in Russian, the word "homeland" has nothing to do with bloodshed. So, it was necessary to find another approach.
The second sin, or mistake, which is more serious than the first, according to Nabokov, is when a translator leaves out difficult sentences that sometimes changes the whole work and even the ideas contained in it. There is an opinion that if a translator does not understand more than 20 per cent of the text it is better that he does not start the translation work at all.
And the most serious mistake is a translator's attempt to "perfect" the author. Thus, from the original work only the general framework remains and the readers can't understand the personality of the author. The translator, says Nabokov, who must wear the clothes of an author is actually in that case trying to wear his own clothes on an author.
It should also be noted that errors do not always detract from the high aesthetic value of a translation. For example, the Russian poet, Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) when translating a poem by Robert Burns (1759-1796) confused the English word "kind" with the German word "Kind" (child) but despite that, his translation became one of the pearls of Russian poetry.
Nor did Lermontov observe the gender of the tree names in German, and in the translation of a HeinrichHeine poem into Russian, he made the pine tree (feminine gender) fall in love with the palm tree (also the feminine gender). Critics have discussed for a century and a half whether it was intentional, whether the mistake "worsens" or otherwise "enriches" the original work and in general whether Lermontov's work should be considered as a translation or not, but the poem has so far been favoured by readers.
It seems the reader's feelings are the main criteria in the debate of whether the translation is good or bad. Of course, all readers (and a critic is also a reader) are not the same and it is natural when there are differences of opinion on a translation.
In a science fiction novel by American writer Ursula Le Guin, a tribe outside Earth regarded the translator as God because he made something incomprehensible to be intelligible.
The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin compared a translator to a horse being replaced at the stations of civilization. So high is their appraisal of the translator, who is regarded as an important mediator in the dialogue of civilizations.
The writer, writing from Russia, is a former lecturer of Universiti Malaya