Analysis of recent literary translation. Seminar (2008)

In 2008, ItzulBaita organized two seminars on literary translation, one on criteria for evaluating literary translation, and one on literary translations into Basque in the last decade.

Given the importance of translation in the Basque literary production of recent decades, ItzulBaita believes it to be essential to promote the analysis of the quality of the translations in question and, as a first step in that direction, organized this seminar in San Sebastian on June 6.

Since literary translation into Basque is quite extensive, the topic was limited for the purposes of the seminar primarily to works translated in the last decade, and children's and young people's literature was excluded.

With translator and Director of ItzulBaita Bego Montorio as the moderator, translators Bakartxo Arrizabalaga, Ander Irizar and Koro Navarro, and writer Anjel Lertxundi spoke for three hours and, in addition to providing considerable information on the present state of Basque literary translation, they also made various proposals and suggested lines of thought for the future.

This seminar was funded in part by CEDRO.

Summary of the seminar

The main points discussed in the seminar were the following:

  • There is a significant lack of data concerning literary translation. There are no easily accessible databases, and the data that are available have not been organized in any way.

Quality of the translations

  • The quality of Basque literary translations cannot be judged taking each translation as an independent work. Their quality must always be considered in the context of literary texts written originally in Basque, previous literary translations into Basque, other types of translation, and the situation of the Basque language. Furthermore, in judging literary works translated into Basque, the dual nature of the works must be kept in mind: they are both literary texts and translations.
  • The quality of these translations has clearly improved in recent years. Nevertheless, there is still a long way to go: the literary effect of the original text is not always achieved, the texts are sometimes too dense and the translation, while grammatically correct, feels fragmented; on occasion the translation is less clear than the original.
  • With respect to strategies for translation, the authenticity and aptness of the translation are generally held to be more important than maintaining word-for-word fidelity to the original text.

Translations and literature written in Basque

  • Basque literary language is created not only by works written in Basque, but also by works translated into Basque. In Basque literary production, compared to that of major languages, translation carries a relatively greater weight.
  • Basque literary texts as a whole may be more uniform than literary translations.
  • Communication between translators and writers is not as frequent as it should be.

The sociolinguistic situation of Basque language

  • Recent developments (the use of corpuses of data and electronic resources, for example) have helped to improve translation.
  • There are a number of factors that have a particularly negative effect on translation, including the lack of standardization of many registers and modes of speech for the purposes of writing and translation, the continuing linguistic borrowing from Spanish or French to compensate for the lack of these registers and modes of speech in the Basque-speaking community, etc.

Literary translation and other types of translation

  • In general, literary translation shows higher quality than other types of translation. This is due largely to the care taken in choosing translators and to the use of additional procedures such as proofreading and editing.

Translators and translation

  • Literary translation into Basque is more than the simple addition of texts to the library and thus, if the overall quality of literary translation is to improve, not only must translators improve their ability, but also it is essential to create appropriate material, and especially conceptual, infrastructures. In major languages, for example, considerable research has been done on literary translation (in philology, stylistics, translation studies, etc.); this has clearly had a concrete effect on translation in those languages.

Areas for development

The primary areas discussed were the following:

  • Proofreading and editing.
  • Tools for translation: Basque dictionaries of use, the need for more Basque dictionaries online, the need for an online corpus of translated works.
  • A systematic analysis of literary translation that integrates philology, literature and translation.
  • Specialized criticism of literary translations.