{"id":7566,"date":"2011-11-04T11:42:12","date_gmt":"2011-11-04T11:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eurologos-milano.com\/?p=7566"},"modified":"2015-11-04T11:46:51","modified_gmt":"2015-11-04T11:46:51","slug":"the-art-of-good-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eurologos-milano.com\/en\/the-art-of-good-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Good Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe are told, in chapter 11 of Genesis, that once \u201cthe whole earth was of one language, and of one speech\u201d. In the aftermath of Noah\u2019s flood, the survivors decided to celebrate their lucky escape in a time-honoured way: with triumphal architecture. \u201cLet us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach even to heaven\u201d is how the Bible expresses this aspiration. \u201cLet us make us a name,\u201d said the children of Noah, \u201clest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth\u201d.<\/p>\n

Fat chance. According to the Old Testament, mankind\u2019s urge to find a common purpose does not appeal to the Almighty. So the idea that men and women should be like gods was a non-starter, and the name of the doomed project was called Babel. As the King James version has it, \u201cthe Lord did there confound the language of all the Earth\u201d. For good measure, he scattered the differently speaking peoples across the globe.<\/p>\n

At the beginning of the 21st century, the world remains a patchwork of more than 5,000 separate and competing languages. But for those who still dream of the restoration of a universal language, the outlook has rarely been brighter: 2011 has been an extraordinary year for the art of translation. Could the tower of Babel actually be rebuilt?<\/p>\n

Many language scholars now accept philosopher Noam Chomsky\u2019s ground-breaking perception that, notwithstanding mutually unintelligible vocabularies, \u201cEarthlings speak a single language\u201d \u2013 an observation Chomsky claimed would be evident to a isiting Martian. For a variety of reasons, we are perhaps closer than ever to making it intelligible.<\/p>\n

Through the power of global media, there is more than ever before a market for literature in translation where the default language for such translations will be British or American English. Such versions may sometimes bear as much resemblance to the original as the wrong side of a Turkish carpet, but that hardly seems to lessen their appeal.<\/p>\n

Lately in the US the appetite for \u201cforeign fiction\u201d \u2013 Stieg Larsson\u2019s Millennium trilogy or Haruki Murakami\u2019s 1Q84 <\/em>\u2013 has sponsored a trend that has inspired new audiences for international literary superstars such as Umberto Eco, Roberto Bola\u00f1o and P\u00e9ter N\u00e1das. Perhaps not since the 1980s, when the novels of Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez and Mario Vargas Llosa became international bestsellers, has there been such a drive to bring fiction in translation into the literary marketplace.<\/p>\n

In prose, if not in poetry, there are few worries about the \u201cvanity of translation\u201d identified by Shelley, who wrote that \u201cit were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as to seek to transfuse from one language to another the creations of a poet\u201d.<\/p>\n

New editions of Tolstoy\u2019s War and Peace<\/em>, Flaubert\u2019s Madame Bovary<\/em> and Proust\u2019s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu<\/em> have pushed overworked translators \u2013 a shy breed \u2013 into the spotlight. David Bellos, whose new book, Is That A Fish In Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything<\/em> was published this autumn, observes that, in Japan for instance, \u201ctranslators are rock stars\u201d with their own book of celebrity gossip, The Lives of the Translators 101<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To read more:\u00a0www.guardian.co.uk\/science\/2011\/nov\/27\/translation-creating-global-language?INTCMP=SRCH<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe are told, in chapter 11 of Genesis, that once \u201cthe whole earth was of one language, and of one speech\u201d. In the aftermath of Noah\u2019s flood, the survivors decided to celebrate their lucky escape in a time-honoured way: with triumphal architecture. \u201cLet us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":7567,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-translation-and-interpreting"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Art of Good Translation - Eurologos Milano<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/eurologos-milano.com\/en\/the-art-of-good-translation\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Art of Good Translation - Eurologos Milano\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cWe are told, in chapter 11 of Genesis, that once \u201cthe whole earth was of one language, and of one speech\u201d. 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