“la parole exportée”

BBC Radio 4’s Today program has a segment on this topic:

“A group of literary figures, broadcasters and politicians are campaigning to keep some unusual words in the Collins English Dictionary. Elaine Higgleton, of publishers Harper Collins Dictionaries, and Poet Laureate Andrew Motion discuss whether this is a ‘niddering’, or cowardly, response to archaic language.”

Those who publish dictionaries do that every year: they sift through the language and every year, it is reported that a few little-used words have been removed from dictionaries for the general public, and new more widely-used words have been introduced. Both choices typically generate some criticism.

At the same time, we have the French Academy documenting the French language at snail speed (but getting there).

More importantly for us translators, there is the FranceTerme website that tells you all about the new French terms that the official Terminology Commission has validated for you to use. The latest available glossary is a English-French-Chinese glossary on the Beijing Olympic and Paralympic Games.

But our language, like all others, has a life of its own, and doesn’t always feel like taking orders from a government department or the French Academy.

You need a lot of faith to be an official terminologist, because language cannot be restricted to what a group of people, however distinguished they may be, are telling you is OK to use. Inventing new terms is tricky. I listen to a business radio most of the time, and never heard the term “investisseur providentiel” mentioned once (for business angel).

My guess is that it doesn’t ’speak’ to the people in the industry. In common everyday language, “providentiel” has a supernatural connotation, and one of unexpected benefit.

Somehow this doesn’t sound exactly the same as business angel.

Or does it?

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Bernard Hoepffner, a translator, has the honor of the media this week. He was on the French public radio this morning, for 45 minutes of pure listening pleasure for translators. A few quotes:

‘Translators are the best readers…. We read down to every comma…’

‘When you translate, you try to replicate the writer’s eye, and ear, and hand… up to the point where you feel you could almost “write” the original… Of course it’s not true, but you often get that impression…’

‘Something is so universal in this book…’

‘There’s a paradox: the original work of art doesn’t age, translations age… Ezra Pound said: each generation should re-translate its classics…’

‘Slang gets outdated quickly. Translators try to use a form of slang that existed in the 50’s and is still here… The reader is led to believe that the book was written today, but it was written in the mid-19th century…’

‘Translators have a little more power these days…’

Here is the link. http://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/em/eclectik_dim/index.php

You can listen again for up to 45 days.

Here is another deeply insightful interview in a news magazine: http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/2008/09/18/cest-mark-twain-quil-ressuscite

Bernard Hoepffner’s own website is here: http://wvorg.free.fr/hoepffner/ with an impressive list of his translations.

With this new translation, the aim is to restore the full power of the books, which have been restricted to the children’s books market. Unfortunately as Bernard Hoepffner states in his printed interview, Mark Twain is so famous here in France that few people bother to read him now. I had to read Huckleberry Finn’s Adventures in English for my degree many years ago, but I never read any translation. I caught a few glimpses of the children’s TV program that was made of it, when my kids were small. That is probably the only version of the book that many people will have had contact with.
I’m definitely getting these new translations. Actually I’ve just ordered them online.
As for now, after an hour of intense daydreaming, I’m back to my technical translations… different styles, different purposes, different uses, but I’m thankful for people like literary translators.