I love French and I have been studying it for four years. Over the next six weeks of this project I plan to combine my love of the French and English languages to explore a new interest of mine: the art of literary translation. How does one transfer ideas across languages without losing or changing any of the original meaning? I will attempt to discover the answers to this question as I learn about translation.
At first I plan to do some reading and research about the process. I have already found a resource from the American Literary Translators Association called The Making of a Literary Translator that I plan to use. There is also a book that I want to look into called Literary Translation: A Practical Guide by Clifford E. Landers.
My main goal is to practice what I learn by actively translating a French work. I chose to use this book:
Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It is a well known classic but one that I have not read before in either English or French. I am excited to read Le Petit Prince in it’s original language; I have heard that it is a beautiful and touching story. After I have done some initial research I will read the story in French and personally translate it into English. From the point I start translating, I will attempt to do at least a little bit of translation every day (I'm allowing myself off on March 7-9. I don't think I will have the time since the musical is on those days). Weekly I will review what I have translated, make an assessment of my progress and how much more I need to do, and update my blog with excerpts from my translation. Once I have finished my translation I plan to compare it to the published English edition of the book (titled The Little Prince). I want to analyze how well I communicated the original ideas of the story and see what alternatives there are to the word choice that I use and also identify and fix the mistakes or miscommunications that I make (because I know that I will make them).
I am excited to get started! Who knows, with this project I might not discover just an interest but a potential career path I may want to pursue...
Hi Rebekah I think your genius project is unique and cool. I have read the Little Prince before and it is a great book (and the pictures are so cute)! How will you present your work? Will it be a hard-copy or online? I think you should post your translation progress on here, like posting pages x-x as a blog post. I hope you liked the book!
ReplyDeleteThanks Ashley! I am really excited to read this book; I have wanted to for a while now. I'm thinking that I will print out a hard copy of my translation to bring in to class, but I will also have it online. Once I start translating, I probably will post weekly excerpts of what I have translated to show my progress.
DeleteGood choice! I absolutely love "The Little Prince." You'll have to tell me if it's prettier in French. Because it's a children's book, the words should be simple enough that you'll know them. I'm just concerned about the time it will take for you to translate. You told me that you were slightly behind; will you still be able to translate the whole thing? The book is broken into sections, so you could just translate a set amount of it...
ReplyDeleteYou're right Nicole, I'm not at the point I would like to be at with this project at the moment. I'm going to try my hardest to translate the whole thing. However, because of the initial research I still need to complete and the reading through of the story I will have to do before I start translating the words I am not sure how much I will actually get through. If I find later in the process that I will not be able to finish the book, I'll reset my goal to a certain number of sections.
DeleteThis sounds like a very interesting project! "The Little Prince" is such a touching story, I'm glad that you choose to translate this particular text. Similar to what Nicole said, I also think that maybe you should pick some sections and translate them instead of the entire book if you don't have enough time. Translating an entire book in such a time frame is very challenging, although I am sure that you can do it. You'll probably learn a lot of French in the process too!
ReplyDeleteThanks Carolyn. Yes, I probably will end up choosing a certain number of sections to translate, but at this point I don't think I can decide on that number yet. And if it turns out I get through them really fast, I can always do more. I think though that this is going to take me longer than I had previously estimated.
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