A Kamikaze pilot left his children a final note, encouraging them to “be an unbeatable person like your father and avenge my death.”
Who was killing whom? The pilot, Captain Masanobu Kuno, was on a suicide mission to sink an Allied warship near the end of World War II in the Pacific. It was unlikely Kuno expected his children to assassinate the Japanese emperor when they grew up. Besides, what’s with that qualifier “unbeatable?” It just didn’t sound Japanese, a people known to speak humbly. Last I checked, Kuno wasn’t a superhero in a Marvel universe. Red flags abound when I read this letter and attempted to translate it from English to Chinese. I needed to investigate the original in Japanese.
Kuno wrote it in the katakana script, easier for his youngsters to read aloud, but harder for my cobwebby Japanese to decipher. The top-level Japanese proficiency certificate I received was over twenty years old, but it was clear the pilot was urging his children to be “better than your father, so that he hadn’t sacrificed himself in vain.” The English version was a mistranslation, making Kuno sound like he was auditioning for a Rocky sequel. I confirmed it with a sensei friend Masayuki Itomitsu, and relieved that I didn’t fall into the relay trap.
Relay translation has more holes than the Taiwanese delicacy stinky tofu. Translating from a translation is like making a photocopy of a photocopy. Grainier than ever, the second copy also inherits the blemish from the first. It’s kind of like a relay race, where you reach back for the baton, grab it, and sprint off— only to realize you’re holding your teammate’s camo-case phone instead. You whirl around. The teammate’s vanished into the crowd. Now what? Do you chase after him like a headless fly, demanding your rightful baton, or do you keep running and hope nobody notices? Staring down this dilemma, I’d sworn off translating second-hand. I’m not here to play hot potato with someone’s else’s translation blunders. No more game of telephone.
Before diving into the Kamikaze letter, I’d translated Onze Minutos based on Margaret Jull Costa’s English translation. Paulo Coelho is the Brazilian author who gave the world The Alchemist, and Costa is an award-winning British literary translator. Her translation, Eleven Minutes, flows smoother than a glass of caipirinha. There was just one tiny hiccup with plurals, but fortunately for me, Chinese doesn’t bother with plurals, or tenses, or conjugations, or subject-verb agreement, or any of the other pesky grammatical rules an alphabetical language possesses. Cultural incongruities, if there were any, flew over my head like a flock of toucans, perhaps because I knew as much about Brazil as the Portuguese language, which was zilch.
For Chinese speakers, the best known example of relay translation is the Bible, which comprises of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts. The Chinese Union Version, the most widely read Chinese translation, is based on the English Revised Version along with the King James Version. The Buddhist canon in Chinese was first translated from ancient central Asian texts, which was a translation from its original Sanskrit. It wasn’t until much later that the Sanskrit-reading Chinese monks let Buddha speak for Himself.
Relay is necessary when direct translation between two languages is hard to come by. There must be, in the case of Onze Minutos, countless Portuguese-to-Chinese translators, but you also need to consider that literary translation demands patience, and low financial compensation is a challenge not every translator is willing to accept. A much sought-after translator may have a cushier gig somewhere else. Besides, for an editor, working with a new translator presents another set of complications.
In 2019, Spring Publishing in Taiwan set its eye on Swedish novelist Johan Theorin, and the editor-in-chief Yi-shun Chuang (莊宜勳), approached me with Theorin’s debut, Skumtimmen. I’d long admired Stieg Larsson for his Millennium series, and I longed to read Norwegian novelist Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole detective stories. Scandinavian mystery now came knocking on my door. I couldn’t exactly pretend I wasn’t home. The opening chapters of Marlaine Delargy’s English translation, Echoes from the Dead, haunted me so much I signed on to translate his follow-up Nattfåk, too. My “no more relay” pledge was DOA.
Set on the Baltic isle of Öland, Skumtimmen laid out a nostalgic tale against a backdrop of limestone flora. I vowed to convey the bleak Swedish suspense into an equally chilling read in Chinese. Not knowing a word of Swedish, I followed Delargy’s lead as best as I could, while researching Swedish names to avoid translating them from English. Duolingo introduced me to Swedish, and my translation of the character names, such as Julia and Gerlof, was pronounced the Swedish way. I preserved the original “yee” sounds in “J” and “G” to exude an exotic allure, and to prevent my Chinese readers from associating them with a New Yorker ordering a latte.
Geographical names also called for extra attention, even if they were fictional. I could have simply translated Stenvik into a four-character monstrosity, which would sound foreign in a nondescript way, devoid of any significance. I went the extra mile by confirming with Theorin that Stenvik literally meant a rocky bay in Swedish, so two characters (岩灣) in Chinese did the trick. Chinese translators love long foreign names because they bump up the word count— and the paycheck, but I prefer them short and sweet. Readability is my goal, extra pay be damned. In communicating with Theorin, I also unlocked my inner detective. I caught a minor error in the English version in which one speaker was mistaken for another.
In Taiwan, English and Japanese remain the dominant sources of translation, but the so-called “small languages” are gradually stepping out of the shadows, ditching their middlemen. Le Petit Prince now speaks to his Chinese readers via French instead of English, thanks to the direct translation by Liu Li (劉俐). There’s even a French-to-Taiwanese translation by Ya-jing Tsai (蔡雅菁). Looks like Little Prince now enjoys less linguistic control of English.
In translating Il nome della rosa into Chinese, former Venice resident Anyu Ni (倪安宇) gondola-ed her way around the English version, lifting the literary veil to reveal Umberto Eco’s most authentic self.
“Smaller” than French and Italian are the ancient Biblical tongues, Aramaic being long extinct. The Chinese New Version, the latest Chinese Bible translation, is a collective effort combining scores of scholars, language workers and religious leaders, sourcing the original texts while complementing with The Dead Sea Scrolls. The new translation patches up the holes left by the English medium, while mostly maintaining those much-quoted canonical phrases. Despite the update, the Chinese Union Version, with the archaic flavor of its own, now known as the Bible style, remains popular with Taiwanese Christians.
Even though every translation is a creation in itself, people of an organized faith may not value creativity as much. Cutting out the middleman is the most realistic way to stay true to the original. In this case, the Chinese New Version presents an apple in the followers’ eye. It’s up to them to accept it or not.
When the Swedish-to-Chinese Skumtimmen hits the shelf, you can bet I’ll be the first in the presale line, waving my yellow and blue flag of approval. I have done my part promoting Theorin and laid down the groundwork for him. I’ll retire my relay version with no regrets.