(no subject)

[pearwaldorf]

I have been watching The Untamed, the live-action adaptation of a Chinese xianxia novel called Mo Dao Zu Shi. To my understanding, there's no official translation of the novel and until Netflix, no professionally done subtitles. The subs on Viki, the big A-drama site, are contributed by users. And having watched a few minutes of an episode I've already seen, I'm about ready to pitch the Netflix subs.

So there's been discussion of translation, not just to make it comprehensible in the translated language, but to try to convey the nuance and cultural context of the source language. Obviously this is much more of an art than a science (see people's eternal arguments over whether old Haruki Murakami novels are actually better or if the translator was), and I came across this Tumblr post discussing the challenges: "Basically, translation is impossible–so why not make it a beautiful failure?"

And so I talked a little bit on Twitter about my experience dipping my toe into translation. These are copypastaed for archival and retrieval purposes, because nobody has ever been able to find anything on Twitter when they want to.

I went down my own little rabbit hole with this trying to puzzle out a translation for this Neruda poem. It's a pretty short poem and even somebody with as little facility with Spanish as I have can understand it, with a dictionary

"suave

como un desordenado terciopelo"

were the lines that were driving me nuts. For some reason, the translator decided "lascivious" was an appropriate translation for "desordenado". As you can probably tell, the literal meaning of the word is "messy".

"terciopelo" is "velvet", but can also mean a type of plant in Chile, better known in English as cockscomb. Neruda was Chilean.

 

In context I think velvet is the most appropriate translation, but if I wanted to I could probably make a case for the flower too.
 

And now that I've decided on how I want to translate the noun, I have to figure out the adjective. "Messy" is literal and a perfectly cromulent way to describe velvet. But is there another word that could better describe the feeling I'm trying to evoke?

Rumpled? Disheveled? Tousled? Rucked? Mussed?

 

(This is the thing w/thesauri that some young writers don't get. The words aren't the same, but hopefully you can find one closer to what you're trying to say.)

 

That's just two words. Imagine doing that for something longer.

Obviously I have the luxury of spending as long as I want on as few words as I like, and not every word/phrase requires this much thought. A professional translator will be much more fluent in the languages and hopefully cultural contexts, but the challenge remains the same.