خواطر حول الترجمة -4

Reviewing the translation of a book can be either a joy or a lasting nightmare, depending on the quality of the translation. If the translator is equipped and smart enough to do the translation right, then reviewing his work will be a pleasurable experience. He will have done all the hard work, and the reviewing experience will be both engaging and enriching for the reviewer.

The reviewer will enjoy the proper choice of words and the fluid and solid phrasing of the translator. He will only have to catch the errors that slipped through and assure the integrity of the translation. The reviewer doesn’t have to get into the tiny details of each word and/or sentence, and hence could have a better grasp of the “larger picture”.

The last book I reviewed falls into the “joy” category. It’s The Greatness Guide Book 2 by Robin Sharma. For one thing, the original book is a best-seller that makes a great reading. It contains hundreds of wise, yet profoundly simple, insights that help the reader “get to world class and achieve greatness” in both business and personal life.

The translator, though still a fresh graduate, has really done a good job. She had a clear understanding of the subject matter, and her solid and correct Arabic style is evident throughout the translation.

The problem with Sharma’s style is that it’s evasively simple 🙂 His ideas might look straightforward enough when you read them in English, but you are bound to change your opinion when you begin to translate them into Arabic.

Remember: the challenge in translation is not to write good Arabic, that’s easy to do (at least for most translators). Rather, the challenge is to write good Arabic AND remain as close as possible to the meaning of the source text.

I was reviewing the book and keeping in mind that I would write a post about it, so I picked some of the interesting sentences for you to get your hands wet.

When the context is not clear

The very opening idea of the book is very interesting:

Be the best you

When I first saw this heading I murmured: Be what? 🙂

At first glance, I was tempted to translate the heading as "Be the best you can" or "كن أفضل ما يمكنك". However, reading into the passage, trying to get a grip over the context (as you should always do), I found the author quoting Warren Buffet (the famous billionaire) saying: “There can never be a better you than you”. The author explains the quotation saying that everyone in this world is unique and no matter how hard other people try to imitate you they can never be a better you than you.

"Ah, I understand the context now!" said to myself. The author wants us to be better than those trying to imitate us. Then the translation could be something like: "كن أفضل نسخة من نفسك" or "كن أفضل من مقلديك في صفاتك" or something in this line.

However, the following paragraphs turn to the idea that you should be the best you can.

Which part of the context should we take into consideration?

The translator wrote: "أظهر خير ما في شخصيتك". What is your suggestion? I have to warn you that this is one of the cases where every translator says something different and never likes what the others say 🙂

Give it a try before reading my suggestion

كن أفضل ما يمكن أن تكونه

A somewhat uncommon structure

Look at following sentence:

Life is a terrible thing to waste.

This is a common structure in English that -in my humble point of view- shouldn’t be literally ported into Arabic (do you find "الحياة شيء فظيع لإهداره" acceptable? I am not too much against it, but I think we could come up with something better).

As I said, it is a very common structure, and I am sure you have seen it before. Here are a few sentences I could think of:

Love is a hard thing to find.

Greatness is not easy to reach.

>Linguistics is a hard subject to study.

If you studied Transformational Grammar, then you should recall that the deep structure of this sentence is:

Then the sentence undergoes several transformations in order to reach this final “surface structure”. At a certain point in the transformation hierarchy, you will find the format:

It is a terrible thing for someone to waste a life.

Then the "For someone" is removed:

It is a terrible thing to waste a life.

More transformations lead the sentence into the above mentioned format.

Try to write as many alternative translations as you can before reading mine

إهدار الحياة شيء فظيع

إنه لشيء فظيع أن يهدر الإنسان حياته

The dilemma of the adverb of manner

You might have faced quite a few situations where the adverb of manner posed a problem. Here is one:

Be breathtakingly humble.

First, I usually favor translating the word breathtaking literally to "يخطف الأنفاس" because I believe this is closer to the meaning than the dictionary listed meanings, but this is one of the cases that I refrained from doing this.

Here, the word breathtakingly is an adverb of manner qualifying the verb "Be". How would you translate this sentence into Arabic? Of course, you could say: "كن متواضعاً بشكل يخطف الأنفاس", but I then would have to ask you to leave my blog and never come back 🙂

Give it a try before reading my humble suggestion

كن مذهلاً في تواضعك.

No blame, my love

No, this is not a song of Abdel Haleem, it’s what came to my mind when I read the following sentence:

Only a fool blames his bad vacation on the rain.

I found two acceptable variations for this. Can you find them (or preferably more)?

Here are my two suggestions.

الأحمق فقط هو من يلوم المطر على سوء إجازته.
من الحمق أن يبرر الإنسان سوء إجازته بهطول المطر.

..