THE TRANSLATOR'S PURPOSE

The second topic, your attempt to see the text from the point of view of this translator, is sometimes overlooked in translation criticism. You may decide that the translator has misinterpreted the author by omitting certain sections of the text

- notoriously, the first English translation of Hitler's Mein Kampfby Captain E. S. Dugdale contained only about a third of the original, and omitted the most virulent anti-semitic passages. The translator may have decided to deliberately antiquate the narrative and/or the dialogue of his version, e.g., allora tomd - 'Eftsoons he turned', to moderate the figurative language of the original or to 'liven up' simple sentences with colloquial and idiomatic phrases: se tremper hdtivement dans les eaux baptismales europtennes a Strasbourg-'they are hastily initiated into the work of the Assembly at Strasbourg'. Normally all translations are under-translations, less particularised than the original, notably in its descriptive passages (elk est bien laide

- 'she is as ugly as sin') rather than its dramatic, and in its mental rather than its physical passages; you have to establish whether the translator has attempted to counteract by over-translating, resulting usually in a text somewhat longer than the original: // ilail bien charpente - 'He was well built'. You have to assess to what extent the text has been deculturalised, or transferred to the TL culture: Jeu ou gentillesse, Luque avail ete entreprenant dans la voiture - 'Whether to be friendly or by design, Luque had not been idle in the car.' In interpreting the translator's intention and procedures, you are here not criticising them but attempting to understand why he has used these procedures. It is all too easy for a reviewer to pounce on a translation's howlers, listing them one after another, triumphantly discovering faux amis, wayward and stretched synonyms ('wistful' translated as triste or nachdenklich), stiff and old-fashioned structures, which, in some situations, may be perfectly natural ('Thus, by the hand of God and man, has the city emerged largely unblemished' - official guide to York)*, anachronistic colloquialisms, literal translations of stock metaphors, and to ignore the fact that translators are vulnerable, that good translations can and do tolerate a number of errors, and that translators who translate in a stiff, old-fashioned, colloquial or racy style that does not square with the original may be doing so deliberately, however misguidedly. If so, it is your job as critic to suggest the reasons. (In a better world, these would be given in the translator's preface.) In any event, here you empathise with the translator, and you distinguish between incompetence (inadequate knowledge of SL and/or topic) and a translation method which may be too idiomatic or too academic for your own tastes but which appears consistent.