“To what extent can a translation be referentially ‘unfaithful’?” (p.30). This is a quote by the famous Italian writer Umberto Eco, famous for works such as The Name of the Rose and other novels/essays. In his quote, in the book Experiences in Translation, Eco is posing the question of how communicative a translation can possibly be until it loses its faithfulness to the original text. The “spirit” of a text is the original meaning the author is trying to convey. A translation becomes unfaithful when the translator loses the spirit of the source text in the target language.
When a translation is too loose where the meaning can be interpreted other ways that would not be found in the source language, then there is a major lack of faithfulness. In a dramatic example, if the sentence is “lei ha un panino in forno”, meaning that there is bread cooking in the oven, and is translated to “she has a bun in the oven”, it does not only that she is baking something in the kitchen, but that expression is also a common light-hearted way to say that a woman is pregnant. By there being an added extra level interpretation or meaning that was not there originally, means that the translator has added more to the story. By adding this ‘extra layer’, the translator adds what was not originally there, which is not the desired outcome. The goal should be to keep the translation as close to the source text as possible while conveying the message it was meant to.
The meaning of the text can be found through a majority agreement, meaning what the accepted interpretation and connotation is. For example, it is agreed upon that in Hamlet’s soliloquy “To be or not to be” is referencing whether he should live or die. Finding the meaning can be difficult in certain books or poems, but using context in deciphering meanings is key.
Adding bias to translation also sways away from the author’s original intentions. The quote “il ragazzo ha perso l’autobus per due minuti” means “the boy missed the bus by two minutes”. If a translator were to write “unfortunately, the boy had missed the bus by only two minutes”, the words “unfortunately” and “only” would add a bias to the story. By the quote, the author does not tell whether the boy missing the bus was necessarily negative. Perhaps he ended up finding a $20 bill on the floor that he would not have found if he had taken the bus. It is not up to the translator to make the decisions of the author.
Maintaining a balance between keeping the language faithful while still having the meaning be the same in the target language is part of what makes translation a complexity. But when a translator translates in a way that is not in the spirit of what the author intended, it becomes “reverently unfaithful”.
Works Cited
Eco Umberto. Experiences in Translation. 2000.