(moved here)
16/11/2006
As you may remember, I've taken a course about Readings in Translation. No assignments, unless you take the readings as assignment. No test, no midterms but Term Paper. It may sound a bit strange to my 'Engineering' friends 'coz almost all engineering courses involve assignments... i.e. Practical subject that you have to practice!!! For Arts subject, I found it quite popular for master level courses. Anyway, not going to talk about this.
My Paper is now on Cicada by Mr. Lin Huai-min but my first choice was originally Brokeback Mountain. I didn't work on it finally 'coz I really don't like the Chinese version from the first few lines and I don't want to have a Paper with "bias".
My classmate presented her Paper on Brokeback Mountain last night and she showed a clip of the movie too! It was soooooo nice! :D Her points are great too... detailed but personally I won't do it that way. I'm not sure if she deliberately miss out the most important feature of the language used in Brokeback Mountain (and in fact the whole Wyomin stories) but I would definitely work on it if I would have done this! ^_^ It is about the "Wyomin" accents! You could never see the word "of" appears inside the dialouges; you could only see a single letter "a". The single letter "a" appears almost every single sentence inside the dialogue replacing words like "of" "out" "an" and etc. This is an attempt to immitate the Wyoming accents. (though it's quite obvious but it is also from an interview from Annie Proulx) So how this "cowboy" (= lower class) accents be translated to Chinese?
Related to the "colloquial" languages, the "cowboy" and the "homo" imply a very strong "US culture" and it is extraordinary trivial that homo associated with cowboy is a sign of discrimination. So how these can be reflected in Chinese?
These are what I would very much like to hear from my dear classmate but I didn't have the answers last night. Rather, she made a very detailed study on the degress of translation like "over" or "under" in terms of mainly "tone" and "style". She quoted one example that I couldn't agree anymore!!!!
"You're too much for me, Ennis, you son of a whoreson bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you."
** my note: see? how beautiful the language is! my classmate said she thought it was the most beautiful part / sentence in the whole story! ** my note: Agree! Not only the language but also the tone and the way Annie put it into a sentence. And it is sooooo "visible" to the reader. A simple sentence like that "phrases" Jack's character soooooo much! So it should be a very difficult task to translate this into Chinese and the translator did a very bad job. My classmate said she thought it was the most badly translated part!!!!!!
「你對我太重要了，恩尼司，你這個賤貨婊子養大的雜種。要是我知道怎樣戒掉你就好了。」
天喔！怎麼會是"戒掉"!!! 人家 "quit you" 是很有意境的！人們說「quit smoking」是戒煙，重點不是放在"戒"而是"為甚麼要戒?"，因為"addicted to it" 所以要"戒"所以是"quit"。這裡是對人說"quit you"，引申的意義是"addicted to you (so much) that I could not control myself anymore"，所以 Jack 說"I wish I knew how to quit you"，句式是"I wish + past tense (knew)"，所以我們知道是"不可能"發生的！所以中譯的「要是我知道怎樣戒掉你就好了」是錯(應該說是不完全正確)的演繹。雖然在漢語中這一句也帶有「我現在不知道，希望以前就知道」的意思，但它沒有完全否定以後是否知道，在某一些場景它也可以理解為"對明天抱有一絲希望"。但在英文中"I wish + past tense (knew)"的句式是用來表達「完全不可能 0%」的場景，e.g. 最經典的例子是"I wish I were a bird"！ Jack 的意思不是說"要是我知道就好了"而是"我沒可能把你戒掉"。但「戒掉」一詞還是很"不搭調"。他的意思是「他完全迷溺於對 Ennis 的感情，無法自跋」意境是超級漂亮的！ 中譯本把那個情調、 那個意境通通殺掉！說情調，"You're too much for me" 是非常棒的一句，但中文的「你對我太重要了」完全不對。英文中的"You're too much for me"，"too much" implies "I can't stand it anymore"，有「我不能承受」之意 (在這裡它更有"我再不能承受了"之意)，跟「你對我太重要了」相差甚遠。還有那句"whoreson bitch"也是非常過份的翻譯。雖然 cowboy 是 lower class，用詞比較粗鄙，但你會對着你愛的人說「你這個賤貨婊子養大的雜種」嗎? 恐怕這個在華語系社會中都不太能說通吧！
That's why my classmate said it was "太過份了". True... if you love the original Brokeback Mountain, especially appreciate the language of the story, you would definitely have the same response as we did. (yup... my "comment" is also "太過份了")
Just to share with you guys an example... I may study it in greater details later after I've finished my own Papers... and may be posting some of my ideas.
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