I thought I was done with this thread until this happened: out of the blue, a total stranger dropped into my mailbox the first few chapters from the authorized Spanish translation.
Naturally, I'm deliriously happy to have this to compare with my efforts (and strangely pleased that I didn't have it sooner so that I stuck with the Japanese version to the end), but while it's very gratifying to see that I actually did a pretty good job after all, it's raised some questions I had not anticipated at all.
I found one sentence that I know the Spanish translator just plain got wrong, combining descriptions of two different characters as if they were one person. That was my first surprise, since this was more than a simple typo.
Remember when I asked about this passage (see above for the whole thing)?
Quote:
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「ガキが、いつか大金持ちになって見返してやるといい 出すと、チャペックは、でもお金じゃ買えないよって、 しつこくいうんだ」
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I ultimately decided to go with this: "The kid boasted that he'd become rich someday and show him. Then Chapek told him firmly, 'Money is worthless you know.'"
But the Spanish translation says: "The boy said he would be rich one day, and then we would see, but Chapek cut him off, saying, "And what are you going to do with the money? Money can only buy things. What you really want is to own [the word used has a connotation of control] a person's heart, right? But that can't be bought with money."
Now that's very different.
But it makes much more sense in the context of why the guy felt this story was an example of how odd Chapek was. So...did the translator just make this up? Did he or she go back to the author and ask for some clarification that a Japanese reader wouldn't need? Or, having read that, is it more apparent how the Japanese implies all that or says it somewhere that I'm blind to?
The other funny thing is that like me, this translator apparently also read that horrible sentence with the 42/46 as "he had
not been afraid," rather than it being a dreadful experience, and doesn't even mention the 7 years. Although the Spanish version makes sense, I'm still going with your reasoning on this one.
Maybe my most annoying find so far is that while I spent a ridiculous amount of time finding out that インドジシュスカー通 was Jindřišská Street, the Spanish translator just threw up his/her hands and skipped over it altogether!
But all this makes me wonder about the process of doing a professional translation. How do they decide what they can/should completely rewrite or skip (yeah, I know that's an entire forum's worth of Q&A.
In this entire post, there's probably only one question that might have an answer)? How much communication is there between the translator and the original author to inform such decisions? While my ability to translate the Spanish is 10,000x better than Japanese, the examples in this post make me feel that I still have to look at what the Spanish says with caution or I might lose what the Japanese said, like playing telephone.