English to French translation

Specialisation

August 23, 2004

Thanks a lot to Zachary for sending me the link to a NY Times article about how bad the English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's highly influencial "Le deuxième sexe" is. The article won't be available for much longer, so I suggest you go and read it quickly before you have to pay for it.

Why was it so badly translated? Because the translator, Howard Madison Parshley, was a "retired professor of zoology who had written a book on human reproduction and regularly reviewed books on sex for The New York Herald Tribune". He had never studied philosophy or existentialism. No wonder he did such a poor job; the language used by De Beauvoir is highly specific to a certain current of philosophy and she was developing a new vision of what it meant to be a woman: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." It was thus rather optimistic to hope that an ageing sexologist might come up with a faithful translation of a radical (at the time) feminist's work.

In his post, Zachary mentions the fact that you need to have a solid knowledge of a subject in order to undertake a translation, and that the rest of the world doesn't seem to understand this. He's right. I've often had people approaching me to translate documents on areas I'm totally ignorant in. They are generally shocked and annoyed when I turn the job down and seem to fail to understand that there are several aspects in a document: even if I master its language, I won't be able to do a good job if I'm not familiar, as least to a reasonable degree, with its subject matter.

... and thanks to Adeline for sending me the link to a new forum dedicated to translation issues.

Comments

There's a way of creating a permanent URL for a New York Times story. I read about it months ago. Here is the best I could Google:
http://discuss.agonist.org/yabbse/index.php?board=7;action=display;threadid=17170
It may be that Calpundit has a better method.

Thanks a lot MM, that's one nifty tool.

Somehow I don't blame this translator. It seems odd to me that the publisher hired him in the first place. They *knew* this book wasn't about sex and reproduction but a highly philosophical topic. Why didn't they ask for references, test translation or a proof that he had previously completed translations in this subject area? But then, he should have told them as soon as he realized that he wasn't able to do the job.

Well, not quite, the article says that the publishers thought it was "a modern-day sex manual". They clearly hadn't researched it very thoroughly, which is hardly professional, but the translator must have realised the first time he read it it was way out of his field of expertise. He should have put them right.

Hm, a publisher who has no idea about Simone de Beauvoir's work? This is all too strange... I wonder why anybody should *research* about Simone de Beauvoir in the first place... isn't that part of a good educational background?

Nowadays, certainly, but in the early 50s? I'm not a de Beauvoir specialist, but I think she was in the shadow of Jean-Paul Sartre for a very long time. Maybe her work wasn't very well-known outside France at that time.

In particular, it's a safe bet _The Second Sex_ hadn't yet been translated into Engleesh at the time, n'est-ce pas?

There's a glorious tradition of (http://piginawig.diaryland.com/030707.html#2) bad translations of philosophy into the Engleesh, in any case, although that may have ended with the post-structuralistes (Derrida et al.).

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