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下文是他在Clarkesworldmagazine（原文链接参见底部的“阅读原文”）上发表的一篇关于翻译的文章。很多翻译学习者会有这样的错觉，如果我把英语学得足够好，做翻译就肯定没有问题。不可否认的是，非常好的英语基础一定对做好翻译有帮助，但是英语好与翻译好之间并没有必然的逻辑。 我们也曾经试用过一名美国人和一名澳大利亚人给我们做汉英，就像中国人做英汉可以把汉语写得非常差一样，原来母语人士也同样可以把英语写得非常差。所有中国人做英汉中出现的问题，在他们做汉英中也都有对应的体现。所以，做翻译真的不容易，两种语言之间的转换有时看似轻松，其实背后也许耗费了译者大量的心血，这一点在刘宇昆的这篇文章中也体现得淋漓尽致。你一定要读完这篇文章，你在语言和翻译技巧层面都会有很多收获。 Gathered in Translation By Ken Liu
Since speculative fiction is about imagined worlds, onemight theorize that it poses fewer problems for translators than genres ofliterature more tethered to the specific cultures and languages of the realworld. In a sense, the theory is right. When the global languageof science is English, it is indeed easy to translate “行波微波激射器” to “traveling-wave maser” because the Chineseterm is simply a word-for-word borrowing from English. When high-fantasy filmsand games are popular the world over, it is likely that a Japanese reader wouldbe perfectly conversant with the hackneyed stereotypes of Orcs and Goblins andDwarves and Elves. But these happen to be the least interesting aspects ofspeculative fiction in translation. Richly imagined worlds draw upon the realexperiences of authors and readers. Based on my own experience as a translatorof Chinese stories into English, and having had my own English storiestranslated into Chinese, I’ve come to appreciate the unique challenges andrewards in translating speculative fiction.
We’ll begin with translation philosophy. Yan Fu, one ofthe earliest Chinese-English translators, wrote the following in theintroduction to his 1898 Classical Chinese translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolutionand Ethics:
There are three difficult goals in translation: fidelityto the source, aptness of expression, and beauty of language. To render themeaning of the original faithfully is difficult enough, but if one focuses onlyon fidelity and ignores the need to craft the words for the benefit of readers,then such a translation might as well not exist.
Most translators probably work under some version of thismantra of “fidelity, expressiveness, and elegance,” but the simplicity of thephrase belies many complexities. Let’s start with “fidelity,” the very definition of whichis slippery. The following passage appears in Xia Jia’s fantasy/scifi story, 《百鬼夜行街》: 有个黄皮的老鬼推着一车面具到我面前，说：“宁哥儿，挑个面具吧，有牛头马面，黑白无常，修罗，夜叉，罗刹，还有辟邪和雷公。”
When I translated this story for Clarkesworld — (“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight”),I rendered it as:
A yellow-skinned old ghost pushes a cart of masks infront of me. “Ning, why don’t you pick a mask? I have everything:Ox-Head, Horse-Face, Black-Faced and White-Faced Wuchang, Asura, Yaksha,Rakshasa, Pixiu, and even Lei Gong, the Duke of Thunder.”
Note that this list of fantastical beings from folkChinese mythology contains three—“修罗，夜叉，罗刹”—imported from Buddhism (or Hinduism by way ofBuddhism). Some Chinese readers will recognize their non-Chinese origins, butfor others, they’re as Chinese as anything else on that list because, in thelong history of Buddhism in China, they have been sinicized and graduallyacquired a set of legends and characteristics divergent from their non-Chineseorigins.
When translating into English, is it more faithful to usethe common, accepted anglicizations by way of Sanskrit (“Asura, Yaksha, Rakshasa”)or more accurate to use pinyin to represent their phonetic readings inChinese (“Xiuluo, Yecha, Luosha”)? The former has the advantage of respectingtheir non-Chinese origins, but the latter has the advantage of subtlysuggesting how they’re perceived by Chinese readers. Without a footnote, is iteven possible to make the diverse, multi-origin nature of Chinese folkmythology known to the non-Chinese reader?
At the same time, note that the world conjured up by thisstory is as far from the everyday experiences of the Chinese reader (that isthe point of fantastical literature, after all) as it is from the everydayexperiences of the English reader. But the precise sense of the exotic and thefantastic evoked by this passage is different for the former (calling up imagesof dynastic China and traditional myths) and the latter (calling up images of“the mysterious Orient,” perhaps with a dash of manga). “Fidelity” iscontextual and elusive.
In terms of expressiveness and elegance, there are evenmore difficulties. What constitutes the right expression? By what scale shouldwe measure the beauty of the language?1
I often hear the advice that idioms, fixed expressions,and culture-specific terms that are not analyzable ought not be translatedliterally. Many who advocate a translation that reads as though it were writtenin English in the first place subscribe to this philosophy. I disagree. For me,much of the joy of reading a translation is in hearing an echo of the original,in seeing English used in a way that suggests the rhythms and worldviews ofanother language. Judicious translation of such terms, when done in the serviceof a particular literary effect, can enhance the reader’s enjoyment withoutsliding into exoticism.
For example, in Xia Jia’s story, I chose to translate thenames of specific dates on the Chinese lunar calendar rather than giving theirapproximate equivalents on the common Western calendar. I could have convertedthese dates—惊蛰，大暑，寒露，冬至—to“March 5th,” “July 23rd,” “October 8th,” and “December 21st.” For most Chinesereaders, the meanings behind the names of the dates are only a faint echo, likehow we might remember that “Thursday” is really “Thor’s Day.” But I decided totranslate them literally as “Awakening of Insects,” “Major Heat,” “Cold Dew,”and “Winter Solstice.” This choice meant that the English reader must workharder to figure out the time of year by contextual clues, but the names alsogive the reader a better sense of how the Chinese calendar is tied to thecycles and movements of the natural world, to the demands and rhythms of theagricultural life. I believe the decision enhances the story’s portrayal of a(seemingly) pastoral, idealized life constructed from elements of pre-modernChinese village traditions.2
As another example, consider the following sentence fromXia’s story: 她说要避雷劫，就得找一个厚德福泽的活人守在旁边，雷公投鼠忌器，就不好轻易掷下雷火。
Which I rendered as:
She says that to hide from the [Thunder] Calamity, aghost must find a real person with a good heart to stay beside her. That way,just like how one wouldn’t throw a shoe at a mouse sitting beside an expensivevase, the Duke of Thunder will not strike the ghost.
“投鼠忌器” is an idiom meaning something like “refrain from actionto avoid harming the innocent” or “those who live in glass houses should notthrow stones” but I felt that it was more vivid to translate it literally intoa simile. Instead of using a cliché to translate another cliché, the phrasetells the English reader something about the source culture and language. Aliteral translation, when properly used, can defamiliarize and reinvigorateboth the source image and the target language to give the reader a sense offruitful strangeness that adds to the experience of reading.3
We accept that a translator has to make many creativechoices, but is the degree of freedom unlimited? At what point do thetranslator’s acts become ultra vires and the translation ceases to be atranslation? Yan Fu himself chose to give short shift to fidelity in histranslation of Huxley, often expanding upon the original with his ownobservations and ideas and omitting passages that he felt did not suit hispurpose of introducing (his understanding of) new Western ideas to a Chinesereadership. The resulting translation was influential but was also subject tocharges of being unfaithful.
This conflict between the author and the translator ispresent in every act of translation, but it’s especially acute in contemporarypassages between English and Chinese. The political divide between China andthe West, exacerbated by the Scylla of Chinese censorship on the one hand andthe Charybdis of the Western gaze on China as the Other on the other hand,turns every attempt to navigate across the gulf between the two languages intoa dangerous journey with no easy answers.
A few examples will illustrate the range of issues. Mystory, “The Paper Menagerie,” has a mother who was once a Chinese mail-orderbride as a main character. In my original, she was born in China right beforethe Great Famines of 1958-61 and lost her family to persecutions during theCultural Revolution. When the story was commissioned for translation by aChinese speculative fiction magazine, the translator excised these biographicaldetails because the famines and the Cultural Revolution remain sensitive topicsin China and subject to censorship. I had to accept the alterations as acondition to publication.
My initial reaction was one of outrage, but furtherconsideration of the matter revealed complexities that were not apparent atfirst. I understood, of course, that the magazine’s staff would be subject to politicalrepercussions if they defied the censorship rules (and these rules are complex,opaque, and constantly shifting). But the translator was also dealing withdeeper, more nuanced issues related to the representation of China in fiction.As an American author, I wrote my story for an American audience and adopted acertain simplified, Western view of recent Chinese history. The Great Faminesresulted from a combination of natural disasters and Communist agriculturalpolicy mismanagement, and to this day the relative contribution of the variousfactors and the precise death figure are subject to debate. The CulturalRevolution, similarly, was far more complex than the relatively straightforwardnarrative of “planned brutality” most in the West are familiar with. Iunderstood these complexities but chose to simplify them to suit the mother’scharacter and to serve the narrative about her I wished to construct, but inthe eyes of Chinese readers these choices can appear as evidence of anAmerican-centric view about China that overwhelmed the individual, human storythat I wished to tell.
Putting aside the odious official practice of censorship,another way to look at the issue is that I chose to frame history a certain wayfor my American readers; why couldn’t the translator choose to frame historyanother way for his Chinese readers? Both of us were using historicaldetails to serve the needs of fiction, to tell a story about specificcharacters designed to achieve a certain emotional effect. If a translator’sjob is to preserve that overall emotional arc of the story, then faithfullytranslating those details in the way I used them may actually get in theway.4 If the translator’s choice hadn’t been (at leastin part) motivated by the official policy of censorship, would it have beenjustified? And, more important, would I have been as outraged?5
Ideally, I would have preferred these details in thestory to be translated faithfully, but with an open conversation with Chinesereaders about the way I used Chinese history to serve my narrative. But thiswas the real world, and I concluded that it was best to allow publication ofthe altered translation while explaining the changes myself through otheravenues. Luckily, a fan translation of the story soon appeared that didpreserve these details, giving Chinese readers an opportunity to compare thetwo and decide for themselves which was more “faithful” in the broader sense. Once you’re sensitized to these issues, they show up inall kinds of unexpected ways in translation. For example, I chose to render thetitle of a short story by Liu Cixin (China’s most famous scifi novelist), 《赡养上帝》, as “Taking Care of God.” I did so in partbecause 上帝 is thestandard Chinese term for “God.” In addition, I read Liu’s story, concerning arace of aliens who manifest themselves to humans as old men in white robes withlong white beards, as clearly intending to reference the Judeo-Christianconcept.6
But the fact that the dictionary defines 上帝 as “God” does not end the debate.7 There’s much more to fidelity than literal accuracy. Aword does not exist alone, but as one term in a web of references embedded inculture and language. Each word brings with it countless semantic ghosts. Andthe ghosts in Chinese are very different from the ghosts in English.
The word 上帝 is of ancient origin, not a neologism imported byChristianity. It has existed since the oracle bone script of the Shang Dynastyof the second millennium B.C., and represented the formless Supreme Being ofancient Chinese religious worship. With the advent of Confucianism, it becameincorporated into the system of rites and justifications for Chinese imperialrule. It was Matteo Ricci, the great Jesuit missionary to Ming China in the16th and 17th centuries, who first translated God (Deus) as 上帝 (causing great controversy in both China andRome). And in modern times, this Western, imported sense has become dominant.For the Chinese reader, the word will thus forever evoke a complex, layeredhistory involving China’s classical past as well as its more recent experiencesof colonialism and foreign domination, of ideological challenges from Christianmissionaries and Chinese revolutionaries (Hong Xiuquan, Sun Yat-sen, etc.) whoembraced Christianity as a force for positive change.
A Western reader faced with the word “God” will have acompletely separate set of emotional reactions and historical references.Indeed, it’s hardly accurate to say that and God are the same word at all. Onthe one hand, as Liu Cixin’s story is about humanity’s responses to alienbeings who claim to have created us and were “God,” translating the title theway I did was “faithful.” But it is also undeniable that an English readerfaced with the phrase “Taking Care of God” would have a completely differentset of semantic associations from a Chinese reader faced with 赡养上帝. Would it have been more accurate for me totranslate the title as “Caring for the Creators”? The latter is far lessevocative and elegant, but perhaps in a sense more accurate. By making thechoice I did, I inevitably rewrote Liu Cixin’s story.8
The other word in the title, 赡养, poses even more challenges. It is a specificChinese concept for the duty of children to care for their parents in old agethat has no exact equivalent in English. The word, shaped by thousands of yearsof cultural emphasis on filial piety, has an emotional resonance for Chinesereaders that cannot be translated.9 One alternative, “The Dotage of the Deities,” suggestedby my friend Anatoly Belilovsky, probably comes closest, and it would strikethe English reader in ways distinct both from my choice and the original.
Finally, I want to note that a good translation canenhance the original in ways both big and small. For example, Tao Ruohua, whotranslated my “Algorithms for Love,” decided to use Classical Chinese totranslate an embedded fictional account supposedly written by Westernmissionaries to China during the Qing Dynasty. This choice evoked for theChinese reader the mood and historical context far more effectively than myoriginal. As another example, Xia Jia, who translated “The Man Who EndedHistory” into Chinese, effectively used numerous colloquialisms and slang togive my Chinese characters a sense of authenticity that is lacking in myEnglish original.
By far the most impressive example in this vein I’veexperienced involves the fan translation of “The Paper Menagerie.” The Englishoriginal rendered some of the mother’s dialog in Chinese (pinyin) togive the English reader a sense of her foreignness. When translated intoChinese, it was not obvious how this sense could be preserved as the Chinesesentences would obviously be perfectly comprehensible to Chinese readers. The translator, Zhang Xinyuan, came up with the novelsolution of rendering those sections with the “wrong” Chinese characters whosephonetic values approximated the intended phrases. In other words, she employeda technique often used to transliterate foreign words into Chinese: usingcharacters chosen for their phonetic value without regard to their meaning(recall “修罗，夜叉，罗刹”/“Asura, Yaksha, Rakshasa” from earlier).10 This way of “writing Chinese in Chinese as though itwere a foreign language” perfectly captured the effect of the original forChinese readers, and defamiliarized the Chinese writing system by highlightingits phonetic nature, a fact often forgotten by those fluent with it.
Translation can never perfectly capture the original. Thetranslator must make choices that re-create the story in a new language for anew set of readers. But it isn’t a simple matter of “lost in translation”;often, the result offers something new as instructive to the target readers asit is to the original author.
Note: Thanksto Anatoly Belilovsky, Helena Bell, Aliette de Bodard, and Alex Shvartsman fortheir comments on drafts of this essay.
Footnotes: 1The choice of the right tense to use in translating Chinese fiction intoEnglish—a side effect of the differences between the two languages—is anothercomplex topic that I do not delve into here. 2The key is to use such literal translation techniques only judiciously. Thetranslated names of the dates in this case may also cause an English reader tolatch onto the poetic phrasings and exoticize the Chinese calendar. Readers offantasy and science fiction may be somewhat more sensitized to these issues asthe genres are full of attempts to rephrase the quotidian to appear strange andunfamiliar, a potentially problematic dynamic when applied to translations fromanother culture. Ultimately, I felt that the use of literal translations herewas justified, but it isn’t without problems. 3Again, this technique must be used selectively. When the metaphrase (aword-for-word-translation) is relatively transparent in meaning, this approachcan delight and enlighten, but for more obscure idioms, paraphrasing would beappropriate. 4For comparison, consider whether an American reader’s reaction to a storytranslated from Chinese that contained a simplified, Chinese-centric view ofthe Kent State shootings may detract from and overwhelm the rest of the story. 5American authors who find that their stories have been altered in translationoften react with outrage and anger, but I invite them to re-consider thereaction in the context of my own experience. 6This understanding was confirmed with Liu Cixin. 7Neither does authorial intent, for that matter. 8When my translation was re-printed, the new publisher altered the title to“Taking Care of Gods” (note the plural). The new publisher, whose staff aremostly Chinese, explained to me that they thought the change was necessarybecause they did not wish to offend Western readers by making too explicit areference to the Christian God. Instead, they wanted to make the aliens seemlike generic “gods.” I was reminded of the controversies surrounding MatteoRicci’s original translation of God to 上帝. 9The tradition of children caring for aged parents at home is increasinglycoming into conflict with an urbanizing, mobile society without a developedwelfare state. A hot-button issue in China, this social background also formspart of the story’s meaning to Chinese readers. 10 Sometimes the characters used in transliterationare chosen to give a semantic hint of the meaning of the foreign word (e.g., “丽莉”—pronounced lili, literally “BeautifulJasmine”—for “Lily” to approximate the sound as well as suggesting the name’sfloral, feminine origin). The nuances in the practice of transliteratingforeign words into Chinese deserve a whole book. |
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