“Post-horses of enlightenment” in the age of Google Translate: How the literary translation industry works in different countries
Deсember 5, 2024
The International Literary Forum, which is organized by the Association of Writers and Publishers Unions of Russia (AWPUR), has set to work at Moscow Gostiny Dvor
Translator Anna Yampolskaya, a senior lecturer at Maksim Gorky Literary Institute, suggested the roundtable participants look into how the job of a professional translator has changed in the past decades, what new tools and literary practices have come to the translator’s aid, and whether machine translators are something to fear.
Alexey Rodionov, a professor at Saint Petersburg State University, remarked that Chinese literature is still off limits to translation software. Its wordplay, historical references, nuances of cultural background are beyond the machine’s grasp. On the other hand, the online translations market has played a positive role in popularizing East Asian literatures: “The translations may be a bit clumsy and amateurish, but at least books get translated, they find their readers and get noticed by publishing market professionals.”
Italian author Paolo Nori, a celebrated translator of Russian classics, said that the hardest literary work for him to translate so far was the poem in prose Moscow-Petushki by Venedikt Yerofeyev. In his view, technological progress is no threat to authors as long as its servants “cannot even translate the phrase ‘hair of the dog’ right into different languages.”
Abkhazian author Denis Chachkhalia agreed: “Does Google get flashes of insight? Would it be able to translate ‘Tyazhelo-zvonkoye skakanye po potryasyonnoy mostovoy’ [Heavy is the resounding gallop upon the shaken pavement]? I don’t think so.”
Author and translator Abuzar Bagirov, professor at the department of Middle Eastern Languages of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, cast a retrospective glance at the 19th century, and more precisely the time when the Polar Star almanac published the Azerbaijani folk tale The Wooden Beauty, translated by orientalist Osip Senkovsky.
“There were no electronic or paper dictionaries, and yet works of literature were translated. It takes a human to translate the state of a human mind,” the writer weighed in.
Alexey Rodionov, a professor at Saint Petersburg State University, remarked that Chinese literature is still off limits to translation software. Its wordplay, historical references, nuances of cultural background are beyond the machine’s grasp. On the other hand, the online translations market has played a positive role in popularizing East Asian literatures: “The translations may be a bit clumsy and amateurish, but at least books get translated, they find their readers and get noticed by publishing market professionals.”
Italian author Paolo Nori, a celebrated translator of Russian classics, said that the hardest literary work for him to translate so far was the poem in prose Moscow-Petushki by Venedikt Yerofeyev. In his view, technological progress is no threat to authors as long as its servants “cannot even translate the phrase ‘hair of the dog’ right into different languages.”
Abkhazian author Denis Chachkhalia agreed: “Does Google get flashes of insight? Would it be able to translate ‘Tyazhelo-zvonkoye skakanye po potryasyonnoy mostovoy’ [Heavy is the resounding gallop upon the shaken pavement]? I don’t think so.”
Author and translator Abuzar Bagirov, professor at the department of Middle Eastern Languages of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, cast a retrospective glance at the 19th century, and more precisely the time when the Polar Star almanac published the Azerbaijani folk tale The Wooden Beauty, translated by orientalist Osip Senkovsky.
“There were no electronic or paper dictionaries, and yet works of literature were translated. It takes a human to translate the state of a human mind,” the writer weighed in.