Translator the psychic
Counseling is far easier than implementing what you have counseled in
real life scenarios. This always comes to my mind when I teach
translation studies. Theories are there and we are just parroting them
before kids. But when you come to the complex task of translation, trust
me; you are in a real trouble.
Recently I was engaged in some English literary extracts which
contained different linguistic issues such as dialect, idiolect and
sociolect variations. These are in other words, the different styles –
regional, personal and social varieties of a language.
Dialects, idiolects and sociolects, obviously, are perceived as such
based on how they differ from what is considered as the standard
language – we can only appreciate the unique characteristics of Scottish
Highland Dialect or Southern American English when we can see where and
how they differ from Standard English. Every regional or class-based
variety has its unique connotations, and it will immediately prompt the
reader to make assumptions and associations.
As such varieties are a product of distinct social, political and
cultural conditions; translators face a challenging task when they want
to carry over that uniqueness in the target language. Just imagine what
we have predetermined about a person who uses Sinhala dialect used in
down south.
 Idiolects actually represent a different challenge, since a
character’s voice will be perceived as peculiar because of its unique,
idiosyncratic features. That uniqueness can lie in cultural references,
in register, or tone, but in any case encountering a distinctive
idiolect can be one of our best chances to explore the creative, or
rather re-creative side of translation. By analysing how these different
varieties are tied together in the eyes of a translator we are reminded
that the unpredictable, chaotic elements of language are indeed the ones
stretching its limits and eventually enriching it the most. Here we also
see why the very concept of “style”, which holds this panel together, is
so hard to define. On the one hand, we might encounter these different
styles in the original work, but the next step would be finding our own
style as translators in order to overcome these challenges.
D H Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ provides a good but
challenging example regarding how to translate a dialect. Lady
Chatterley’s lover, Oliver Mellors speaks a rustic dialect. Although the
book implies that he could use English as a gentleman, his idiolect
reflects more of a rural commoner.
In Will Elliott’s The Pilo Family Circus, a character called ‘Doopy’
speaks in a strange, incoherent and exhilarating way. Undoubtedly he
constitutes a great device for an author to have fun with puns and word
plays, which of course are some of the least translatable elements of
any language. This character’s speech patterns are based on gross
linguistic mistakes, which are also not easily translatable, and often
required to be moved around and replaced with completely unrelated ones
in the target text.
Let’s see, for example, how Doopy distorts idiomatic phrases in
clumsy ways, as in:
“He pooped the question, Gonko.”
“Popped?”
“Yeah, that’s what he done. Goshy done went and pooped the question.”
If I translate this into Sinhala, I am double troubled. First, I have
to find a suitable phrase for ‘popping the question’ as we do not have
either an idiomatic equivalent or cultural equivalent for it.
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