Re: The ART of Translation

Author: * Demetrios Xanthippos - 2 Posts on this thread out of 994 Posts sitewide.
Date: Feb 25, 2004 - 10:15

Kallistos has hit the nail on the head. As a translator myself, I know the value (and difficulty) of catching the style and flavor of the original language while at the same time producing something both intelligible and readable. To be honest, the Felderbaum translation looks more like a machine translation than anything else. (Ok, Babelfish would have left a lot of words untranslated, but still…) We have what looks like almost the original Greek word order and some rather weird translations (what on earth is “the showing forth” supposed to be?).

Frankly, I find the Carter translation a bit weak, too. Too many clauses jumbled together and there seems to be a verb missing. All those clauses are probably a good approximation of the original Greek, but they make for heavy going in English.

Here’s the de Sélincourt translation of the first line:

Herodotus of Halicarnassus, his Researches are here set down to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements of both our own and of other peoples; and more particularly, to show how they came into conflict.

And here’s the Godley translation that can be seen at Perseus:
This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory, including among others what was the cause of their waging war on each other.

Taking a look at these four different translations of a single sentence, one can see just how difficult it is to meet all the demands for accuracy in sense and style as well as readability.