Passing down stories through time and translation
William Hedberg and his collection of translated literature. Photo courtesy of Meghan Finnerty/ASU
How does a story carry across languages without losing its meaning?
Whether in fiction or ancient literary works, its original intentions can easily be lost without careful and thorough translation.
In honor of National Book Month, ASU News interviewed two faculty members from Arizona State University's School of International Letters and Cultures on how they approach this with Asian literature.
“Oftentimes, spoken language is quite different from written language. Even in modern days, you don't really write as you speak,” said Young Oh, an associate professor of Chinese at the school.
Oh looks at how cultures interact to influence each other — how language, books and other forms of media function as a type of cultural transmission and exchange. He has worked on translations that range from academic texts to poetry.
“What I do is constantly translate from Korean, premodern Chinese or premodern Korean to English, and sometimes the reverse as well. The threshold that I experience more of is actually modern versus premodern, so how literary Korean writers used Chinese in the pre-20th century,” Oh said. “There is this leap between different languages, regions and countries. Even between 100 years ago and now, there's constant translational activity, even within the same language or different languages.”
In 2013, he published his book "Engraving Virtue: The Printing History of a Premodern Korean Moral Primer," which explored the print history of the "Samgang Haengsil-to" (translated as "Illustrated Guide to the Three Relations") — the most frequently printed and distributed texts in Chosǒn Korean, a Korean kingdom that existed from 1392 to 1897.
“It's a bit complicated in the sense that it was all written in classical Chinese or literary Chinese articulated by Korean writers around the 15th to 19th century. So that's the premodern times written by non-native speakers,” Oh said. “In that process, I was translating premodern literary Chinese into modern English. The task there is to be able to render the original into a language that we speak, but not too modern because it would lose the original nuances and messages from when it was written hundreds of years ago.”
Another critical component of translation is considering how languages differ in how they function grammatically and semantically. Oh has experienced this while working with publishing companies in various countries.
“For example, in Korea, I had some clashes with the copy editors saying ‘you shouldn't use this’ as it related to certain writing styles,” Oh said. “These differences or challenges, to a certain degree, are how you become literate in another language. It's not just being able to speak, but also being able to make your own discourse work.”
William Hedberg, an associate professor of Japanese and director of The Asia Center at ASU, has translated Japanese, Chinese and English texts. He also explores how original Chinese texts were translated and interpreted by the Japanese in his book “The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon.”
“My book is about this moment in Japanese history where a lot of Chinese texts were being translated into Japanese, and people in Japan really started taking the concept of translation seriously and thinking about what it means to transfer meaning from one language to another, as well as thinking about different approaches in translating Chinese texts into Japanese,” Hedberg said.
He has his own collection of translated works that he says are accurate linguistically and historically, but he has always felt they missed a certain spark that would fully convey the meaning of the original texts.
“You get into literature because it elicits some kind of powerful personal emotional response, and if it doesn't do that in translation, then you failed the text,” Hedberg said. “I find that for most of my students and myself, the hardest part isn't the Chinese and Japanese; it's writing in English or the target language. Your translation is only going to be as good as your mastery of the target language.”
He emphasizes to his students that a text that's readable and enjoyable in Japanese and Chinese should be readable and enjoyable in English.
“Your Japanese or Chinese can be excellent, but if you can’t write passionately or powerfully in the target language, then it's not going to be a translation that moves other people.”
Students interested in learning about the history of Asian languages can sign up for classes such as Japanese Civilization from the Ice Age to Last Thursday or Japanese Food and Food Culture when course registration begins on Sept. 29, or take a look at degree programs including the BA in Asian languages (Japanese), BA in Asian languages (Chinese) and minor in Korean.
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