Translation and Idiom
May. 5th, 2005 08:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtran"Since beauty is honoured all over the Empire, How could Xi Shi remain humbly at home?"
That's the opening two lines of "The Beautiful Xi Shi", one of the "300 Tang Poems" (available at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/chinese/frame.htm, it's number 17).
What I like about it is that there's an entire story just in those two lines. But what's also interesting is to see how much of the idiom has changed in translation. The "all over the Empire" part, for example, is actually just two characters in Chinese - "Tian xia", literally "Under Heaven". The translator could just as easily have used "everywhere" or "all over the Kingdom" or "across the land", to use a more common English idiom. But the mention of the word Empire does something nice and evocative here. It imparts some extra information that brings atmosphere, even it loses some accuracy in conveying the worldview of the original.
So, the question is, for The Silver Bowl, do I aim to use native idioms or translated ones? Am I aiming to give my readers a translated view of how my characters think, or the real thing?
That's the opening two lines of "The Beautiful Xi Shi", one of the "300 Tang Poems" (available at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/chinese/frame.htm, it's number 17).
What I like about it is that there's an entire story just in those two lines. But what's also interesting is to see how much of the idiom has changed in translation. The "all over the Empire" part, for example, is actually just two characters in Chinese - "Tian xia", literally "Under Heaven". The translator could just as easily have used "everywhere" or "all over the Kingdom" or "across the land", to use a more common English idiom. But the mention of the word Empire does something nice and evocative here. It imparts some extra information that brings atmosphere, even it loses some accuracy in conveying the worldview of the original.
So, the question is, for The Silver Bowl, do I aim to use native idioms or translated ones? Am I aiming to give my readers a translated view of how my characters think, or the real thing?
