Saturday, September 04, 2010

Troubled in Translation

There is a memorable bar scene (Note: Potential Spoiler Alert!) in Quentin Tarantino’s  “Inglourious Basterds,” where a German SS major, seated at a table with some other soldiers, asks for three glasses of scotch; the fellow Nazi he’s sitting next to helpfully flashes three fingers to the bartender. But when the major sees the Nazi’s hand gesture, he is jarred: The soldier has just given himself away. “You,” the major says through his teeth, “are no more German than the scotch” --
 
The tip off? The way the soldier made the number “3” with his fingers – the pointer, middle, and ring fingers standing tall, which is the American way; while a German or any European would have held up thumb, pointer, and middle fingers, ring and pinky folded down.
 
The English version of the current Swedish bestseller, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (the first book of the 3-book Millenium series) had many such jarring moments for me. “This sentence is not English,” I would think, as I read a random paragraph in the 600-plus page novel. The word choice or word order were either slightly off or waaay off, forcing me to reach for a pencil and wonder why the publishers had apparently hired a non-native speaker of English to translate.
 
The mystery-thriller’s sloppy punctuation and awkward phrasing started on Page 1, but I did not take that to mean the translator was foreign – just bad. It was not until Page 189 (of the small paperback edition) that the unintended mystery of the translator’s nationality became a leit-motif for me as I read:
 
“Did other people live at that time on the farm?” the text says.
 
Can you hear the mistake? Perhaps it’s subtle but the mistake is nonetheless non-English. It’s like saying, “He walked on Friday to work,” which is perfectly understandable and yet the natural way to say that is, “He walked to work on Friday.” English syntax, that is, basic English word order, puts “Place” before “Time.” (I discuss word order in my blog from January 2007, “Your Word Order, Please: http://thelanguagelady.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html)
 
As I continued, I started finding more “clues” that the translator was probably, (my assumption based on the book’s origin) Swedish. I flipped to the cover page and found that it was translated by Reg Keeland – a name that could be foreign, or not; and which could belong to a male or female, though I pictured a man.  Here are some more examples that seem to give away Mr. Keeland’s nationality:
 
Page 208: “I’m just so damn sick of the whole story. It’s poisoned our lives for decades, and it doesn’t stop doing so.”
 
“… it doesn’t stop doing so” should be “it HASN’T stopped doing so.” Explaining how to use the present perfect tense – as in, “I have written -- is one of the most difficult aspects of teaching English to non-native speakers; basically, the present perfect tense is used to express an action that started in the past that still relates to now. In the above case, a native English speaker/translator would have used this tense instinctively; however, other Western languages don’t have this tense at all (at least to the extent we use it in English) and generally use the present tense to express time passage:  “I am here four years,” instead of “I have been here for four years.”
 
Then there was the word “judgement,” sprinkled throughout the book and spelled with an “e” each time. This is the British way of spelling the word – Noah Webster dropped the “e” for Americans when he took the “u” out of “color,” around 1828 (from “Common Errors in English Usage” by Paul Brian); and since many Europeans learn British English in school, no doubt our Swedish translator was among them.
 
Page 248: “She had a rudimentary knowledge of the law – it was a subject she had never had occasion to explore – and her faith in the police was generally exiguous.”
 
Exiguous? Any translator who knows the vocabulary limits of his/her English-speaking readership, would never have put that word in that sentence. Exiguous? I’ve never heard of it -- never come across it, not even in old SAT practice sheets. But no doubt Herr Keeland found the word in his Swedish-English dictionary, and with the word’s Latin-sounding pomposity, it must have seemed an intelligent choice. But one blissfully nice thing about English is how it generally avoids Latin-sounding pomposity – and a better translation would have been, “and her faith in the police was meager, at best.”
 
Pages 319-320 have so many mistakes, I can almost see the poor Swede’s head bowed down on his computer keyboard in exasperation. There are problems with word order, word usage, and verb tense; and the passage in general has an awkwardness that just does not sound English. See if you agree:
 
“Gottfriend’s cabin … was the place to which Harriet and Martin’s father had retreated when his marriage to Isabella was going to the dogs in the late fifties … And here was also the place that Harriet had been to so often that it was one of the first in which they looked for her. Vanger had told him that during her last year, Harriet had gone often to the cabin, apparently to be in peace on weekends or holidays.”
 
First, “to which” and “in which” sound formal and strange – we just don’t use that construction unless absolutely necessary, and it wasn’t necessary. Secondly, the phrases, “here was also the place” and “Harriet had gone often” sound so distinctly foreign (adverb choice and placement, suffice it to say); the phrase “in peace” is not quite right, and then there is the strange, “… going to the dogs in the late fifties.” Here’s how I would have phrased it:
 
“Gottfriend’s cabin was … where Harriet and Martin’s father had retreated in the late fifties when his marriage to Isabella was going to the dogs … The cabin was also the place Harriet had been to so often, it was one of the first places they had looked for her. Vanger told him that during Harriet’s last year, she had often gone there on weekends or holidays to find some peace and quiet.”
 
But Mr. Keeland’s true “3-Finger” moment came with this, on Page 389:
 
“Norsjö was a small town with one main street, appropriately enough called Storgatan …”
 
Appropriately enough? Why was the main street, “Storgatan,” so “appropriately” named? Well, if you’re a Swedish translator and you forget for a moment that your English audience does not automatically know that “Storgatan” means “Main Street,” then yes – the name was perfectly appropriate.
 
The big surprise for me came on Page 644, the book’s final page, when I googled “Reg Keeland” and discovered that he is, in fact, an American man named Steven T. Murray, apparently the go-to guy for Scandinavian translations. He used a pseudonym for all three of the Millenium series books due to a “miscommunication” with the English publisher, who demanded the manuscripts before Murray had had a chance to edit his translation. So that may excuse, or at least explain, the muddled text, still mired somewhere between the original Swedish and unpolished English.
 
Slack editing aside, the book has taken the publishers (and translator too, no doubt) all the way to the bank. To be fair, though, I found the second book much improved. Appropriately enough.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2 comments:

Reg / Steve said...

Hi Louise, you are so right, the infelicities start with the first sentence! I was not allowed to go over the thousands of changes made by the Scottish editor, who thought I had approved all the changes when I didn't respond to the first 135 pages I received in early 2007. I was simply disgusted. When I was given 10 days to go over MEN WHO HATE WOMEN (the real title) -- at the same time I had another book due -- I simply had no choice but to use a pseudonym.

Be assured that my original translation was done in pretty dang good American English, but unfortunately all the US publishers were chicken to do a book by a dead author -- that's my guess. So it ended up in UK hands. I don't understand why there were so many clunkers inserted, but I haven't read more than that first 135 pages; I can't stand the pain.

Ciaran said...

Americans spell judgement with only 1 e? Judgment just looks so wrong! I quite liked the odd syntax, it made it seem more authentically Swedish.

BTW "The cabin was also where Harriet had gone so often" seems like a more natural phrasing to me.