Literary Translation
Translation of literary works
(novels, short stories, plays, poems, etc.) is considered a literary pursuit in
its own right. Notable in Canadian literature specifically as translators are
figures such as Sheila Fischman, Robert Dickson and Linda Gaboriau, and the
Governor General's Awards annually present prizes for the best
English-to-French and French-to-English literary translations. Other writers,
among many who have made a name for themselves as literary translators, include
Vasily Zhukovsky, Tadeusz Boy-Żeleoski, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges,
Robert Stiller and Haruki Murakami
Back-Translation
A back-translation is a
translation of a translated text back into the language of the original text,
made without reference to the original text. In the context of machine translation,
this is also called a round-trip translation. It is analogous to reversing a
mathematical operation; but even in mathematics such a reversal frequently does
not produce a value that is precisely identical with the original.
Comparison of a
back-translation to the original text is sometimes used as a quality check on
the original translation. But while useful as an approximate check, it is far
from infallible. Humorously telling evidence for this was provided by Mark
Twain when he issued his own back-translation of a French version of his famous
short story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County". In
cases when a historic document survives only in translation, the original having
been lost, researchers sometimes undertake back-translation in an effort to
reconstruct the original text. An example involves the novel The Saragossa
Manuscript by the Polish aristocrat Jan Potocki (1761–1815). The polymath
polyglot composed the book entirely in French and published fragments
anonymously in 1804 and 1813–14. Portions of the original French-language
manuscripts were subsequently lost; the missing fragments survived, however, in
a Polish translation that was made by Edmund Chojecki in 1847 from a complete
French copy, now lost. French-language versions of the complete Saragossa
Manuscript have since been produced, based on extant French-language fragments
and on French-language versions that have been back-translated from Chojecki's
Polish version. Similarly, when historians suspect that a document is actually
a translation from another language, back-translation into that hypothetical
original language can provide supporting evidence by showing that such
characteristics as idioms, puns, peculiar grammatical structures, etc., are in
fact derived from the original language. For example, the known text of the
Till Eulenspiegel folk tales is in High German but contains many puns which
only work if back-translated into Low German. This seems clear evidence that
these tales (or at least large portions of them) were originally composed in
Low German and rendered into High German by an over-metaphrastic translator.
Similarly, supporters of Aramaic primacy—i.e., of the view that the Christian
New Testament or its sources were originally written in the Aramaic
language—seek to prove their case by showing that difficult passages in the
existing Greek text of the New Testament make much better sense if
back-translated into Aramaic—that, for example, some incomprehensible
references are in fact Aramaic puns which do not work in Greek
