Lost in Translation

I've always been a little leery of reading books in translation (especially poetry), because without knowing the other language, I'm not always certain how much of the text is the original author and how much is the translator. Still, the value of a good human translator cannot be stated enough, and even in an age where everything is going digital, it may be awhile longer before computers can do an equivalent job.

The "Chawed Rosin" blog took a look at how well Google Translate did with the first paragraph of Matti Joensuu's psychological crime novel Harjunpää ja rakkauden nälkä, which was published last year in English under the title To Steal Her Love. The results speak for themselves.

I thought I'd give Google Translate another chance, so I plugged in the first paragraph from Jo Nesbo's novel Nemesis in the original Nowegian. Here's the translation of that passage by Don Bartlett:

I’M GOING TO DIE. AND IT MAKE NO SENSE. THAT WASN’T THE plan, not my plan, anyway. I may have been heading this way all the time without realising. It wasn’t my plan. My plan was better. My plan made sense.
    I’m staring down the muzzle of a gun and I know that’s where it will come from. The messenger of death. The ferryman. Time for a last laugh. If you can see light at the end of the tunnel, it may be a spit of flame. Time for a last tear. We could have turned this life into something good, you and I. If we had followed the plan. One last thought. Everyone asks what the meaning of life is, but no one asks about the meaning of death.

And here's that same section courtesy of Google:

I'm going to die. And it would not make sense. It was not this plan was not my plan, anyway. The fact that I still have been moving here full time without knowing it, so be it. But my plan was not so. My plan was better. My plan gave meaning.
   I stare into the mouth of a gun and know that it is there he will come. Messenger. Transport Man. Time for a last laugh. If you see light in the tunnel, there may be a random flame. Time for one last tear. We could have made this life for something good, you and me. If we had followed the plan. One last thought. Everyone asks what is the meaning of life, but not what is the meaning of death.

Admittedly, digital translation has come a long way from a decade or so ago with other online translator tools, but I had to chuckle a bit at the Messenger Transport Man. Some of the little cultural nuances are apparently harder to translate than others.

Comments

[Dorte H]

It is rather funny for a Scandinavian reader to come across this quite widespread scepticism of translated literature. When it comes to crime, we don´t have much else, and I´d say that on the whole human translators do it better than google. But unfortunately the pay is lousy which means that if you know the original language, it is often possible to guess what the translator SHOULD have written.

[BV Lawson]

Fortunately for many Europeans, you learn English and other languages in school so that you're bilingual or multilingual by the time you graduate, making translations of English-speaking authors a little bit less critical. In the U.S., you're lucky if you can get a couple years of a foreign language in high school. I'd love to be a polyglot, myself.