A Matter of Translation

In "My Work" series, I've attempted to explain my method of translating Turkish lyrics to help others. Conveying a clear meaning of feeling through the concentrated choice of words and correctly corresponding imagery is a craft that takes practice.

Over a decade later, there is a huge online volume of advice on what a good translation entails. Below is a main summary of the important aspects you can find with a simple search on Google.

The American poet Robert Frost is quoted as saying, "Poetry is what gets lost in translation". So how do you translate the word in an art form effectively?

Translation should be done keeping in mind that translation is not just changing words from the source text into the equivalent words of a target text. It's the transformation of a source language into a new document that doesn't simply repeat what the original said, but one that delivers that description to a different culture, audience, and market.

A good translation shouldn't read like a translation, and for that reason, readers who have taken advantage of a gifted translator's talents might have treated the work as something to use themselves without due credit, because the translator has made him or herself "invisible".

However, due to the intricate and often subjective process that goes far beyond a simplistic word-for-word exchange, it has been said that translation is an art, and the end result an art form. The line is a fine one between the translation of an art form communicating understanding of the art work itself and the artist, and in doing so, being an art form in itself."

I won't deny sometimes it takes as much effort, but I don't know if I would say it was an art form. Certainly a craft, certainly a vehicle that carries an art form across linguistic boundaries - but I have always advocated that what should change in a translation is not the work being translated, but the awareness of the reader new to the language. The words are translated to reveal the art to another culture; the best translator ensures that as little as possible is lost.

Adept translators often share the same pitfalls. A 2016 article in the Observer titled "The subtle art of translating foreign fiction" reveals some of them, while hitting home the opinion that a translation matters. And the observations of Italian and Korean translators about the peculiarities of their chosen languages could be said of Turkish, placing it somewhere in between.

Turkish is one of the oldest functional languages. As a result, similar to Korean, it's a language that marks formality, and uses honorifics; in Turkish this highlights an ancient tribal age-based hierarchy with later addiditions of Islamic and Persian codas on human interaction. Idioms are ingenious and proverbs are ancient.

Capturing the resonance of Turkish and placing it into an equivalent English cage is as difficult as holding on to a slippery snake. Similes are loose, metaphors a puzzle. Large gaps are left for you to fill in. That often doesn't work for an English reader, the translation just wouldn't "sound right". It has a reliance on ambiguity and repetition. Repeating words in English doesn't give you the same poetic effect or emphasis as in Turkish. Gel is come; gel gel is come quick. Here, emphasis denotes urgency.

So you have to tighten the translation and pin the meaning down. It makes it less exciting, restricts the limits of a reader's imagination. But as English shows, giving something a definitive meaning doesn't have to make it boring. Context, imagery and suggestion can all provide ambiguity, if not to meaning, then to intention.

Like Korean, Turkish is a subject-object-verb language, so a lot of the action starts when the sentence ends. That usually means the word just before the verb is the most important, but that is only if everything is definite - if it is the and not a or some of something you are writing about.

If it is, then according to textbook grammar the subject and object can swap places in a Turkish sentence. And that's only if you want to be correct, in street grammar you can swap them all around. Plus, the subject is often left out if it is a personal pronoun, since it can be derived from the verb conjugation.

Right about here, I will have lost some of you. But despite what you've just read, Turkish grammar isn't very complicated - comparatively - until you get to the verbs. Verb conjugation in Turkish is rather complex: Maddening, infuriating, irritatingly beautiful complexities. Like Italian, it turns Turkish into a very expressive language. This is where it sings a music of its own. As the Italian translator of the Observer article elucidates, it does lots of little things English doesn't do; you can add suffixes to words to give them all kinds of subtle nuances.

But this is just "world-building". Part of what makes a good translation is that the translator has to be immersed in the world of the language worked in. You may be born into it, or a willing traveller, but you need to be a bridge from that world into another.

Apt then, that the English word "translation" derives from the Latin word translatio, which comes from trans, "across" + ferre, "to carry" or "to bring" (-latio in turn coming from latus, the past participle of ferre). Thus translatio is "a carrying across" or "a bringing across": in this case, of a text from one language to another.

So, if a few interested tourists have remained this far down in the tour, let's now see how we can translate a song's lyrics, while losing as little as is sensibly possible. The point here is that you will minimise loss in the translation if you can convey the same feeling evoked in the original, and not get stuck on a literal word-for-word swap.

When I am asked for advice on this, I normally offer these three steps:

1. Don't get bogged down in detail just yet. Strive to initially convey the overall feeling of the text.
2. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is always better to leave out, then put in, if it causes confusion or breaks the chain of feeling underpinning the text.
3. Allow your choice of words in the detail of the text to conform to the two steps above.

Let's put this into practice by translating the lyrics to "Yalnızlar Treni" (Lonely Hearts Train) into English. The song has been covered by Tarkan in a tribute album to Nazan Öncel. For the Turkish song and its lyrics, I would ask you buy the album, and then compare my translation below.

In translating the song there were a couple of creative choices that illustrate well the points made in this article. The first two words of the opening verse is a perfect example. Nöbetçi sevgilin is meant to mean being a lover dutifully on watch for their partner night or day. I translated this as a lover on-call, because it implies the same unpredictablity. Employees who work on-call are expected to be available at any time of day or night, usually with short notice, to carry out their working duties. Although they are not actually on duty, and nöbetçi strictly means being on duty, the implication is the same.

In another example, İnceldiği yerden kopsun idiomatically may be used to mean "let the chips fall where they may". But a direct translation seemed more appropriate to its imagery, as the song is about a break up. Similarly, Ne senin yüzün güldü literally means "your face never smiled" - but this time instead of a straight translation, I preferred "You were never happy".

The choices are ones that convey the feeling clearly across the boundary of two languages. A third example is Kanlı bıçaklı, which could be used to mean "daggers drawn" in a blood feud, constantly fighting "tooth and nail" - here used with one's own feelings, "to be at odds" with oneself in inner turmoil. I chose to describe it as simply as possible for stylistic reasons; in the same way I have played with the grammar in English, to give the words its musical quality where possible without compromising original meaning.

Whether you agree or not with my choices in translation, the aim is to carry the sense of the song through to a different audience. A different translator would produce a different translation, and if crafted right, the preference would be a matter of taste - and translation - but the evocation of feeling of the song should be all its own.

<< Read more: On translating Turkish lyrics | About words >>