Assignment 5 ( Iain Banks, The Bridge)

The Bridge is a novel written by Scottish author Iain Banks. It was published in 1986. and it represents one of the best Iain’s works. On the surface, The Bridge is a novel about three different protagonists: John Orr, The Barbarian and Alex. The reader is not told his full name but it is hinted to be Alexander Lennox, a troubled man who crashes his car while gazing at the Forth Bridge and goes into a coma. What reader will later realize is that all the characters are the same character, Alexander Lennox, who, while lying in a coma, revisits memories of his life up until the moment of the crash. Mixing realities, the concept of doppelganger, different allusions, etc. don’t make this book a fast paced one but Banks instead offers the reader the chance to literally enter the mind of the character – an opportunity that must not be missed.

Before starting my translation I read an excerpt three times (some sentences even more than three times). Upon my first reading I figured out the main idea of the text. We are given a very detailed description of a place around the character- the dark station, its surrounding, noises,…Since the text is full of adjective phrases it was really hard including all of them in my translation but as the text insists on gradation of images I did my best  to adapt my translation to the original version.

During the translation I used Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (8^th edition), Wikipedia.com, Google.com. I didn’t find all the answers in them but I must say, notes from the class did help me a lot. 

Problems: 

•  "The dark station, shuttered and empty, echoed to the distant, fading whistle of the departing train." The first sentence of the paragraph seemed as a quiet a challenge. The entire sentence represents the gradation of adjectives. It was really hard including all of them in a translation. The sentence has to be meaningful and putting adjectives, one by one, was not a solution. So I divided this large sentence into two smaller ones and it sounded like this: Mračna stanica, prazna I pusta. U daljini odjekivao je jenjavajući zvižduk voza koji je odlazio.
•  "I wanted to hear its panting breath, the busy clatter of its pistoned hearts, the chatter of is valves and slides." This construction was one of the hardest in the text for me. These are all the noises of the locomotive. As I don’t know much about trains, its parts and the noises it makes I looked on the internet, but my search wasn’t successful. I didn’t manage to find corresponding expressions in Serbian so I translated them, more or less, freely, in a descriptive way. Hteo sam da čujem njen brekćući dah, vredno klepetanje srca njenih klipova, torokanje ventila i klizača.
• "Some wisps of steam or smoke, only slowly dispatching in the valley’s moist, chill air, hung above the black slate and soot-darkened bricks." The first problem here was finding a corresponding equivalent to construction some wisps of steam or smoke which I in the end translated as pramičci pare ili dima. But I think it could also be translated as oblačak,. Another problem for me was to figure out what black slate is. After reading this sentence several times and browsing through my notes I concluded it was a material, used for covering roofs, or, in Serbian: crepovi. So my translation of this sentence is: Poneki pramičci pare ili dima, tek polako su se prostirali kroz vlažan, hladan vazduh u dolini, I visili nad crnim crepovima I počađavelim ciglama.

 f    Before posting my translation I read it twice to make sure I didn’t make any mistakes. I made a few corrections but translation remained the same. Notes and discussions we had on our previous class really helped me a lot and made my translation easier. This was definitely the hardest text we did so far so I will grade it with 9 ( in case there is one even harder).

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Assignment 4 ( Amy Tan, The Opposite of fate)

Amy Tan is an American writer, best known for her work The Joy Luck Club, which has been translated into 35 languages. However, Tan has written several other bestselling novels, one of which is The Opposite of fate: A Book of Musings, a collection of non-fiction essays.

This collection of non-fiction writings includes multiple genres: essay, email, responses to journalist's questions, eulogy, love poem, university presentations, travel journal entries, and a commencement speech. Hence Tan terms the work "musings". It deals with multiple topics, ranging from memoirs of childhood and young adulthood, writing tips, her traumas such as the torture and murder of her best friend, the death of her father and brother, the complicated psyche of her mother, Daisy Tan, and past and present tragedies and struggles.

Before starting my translation I read an excerpt three times. Based on the information given in the text and the style of writing it wasn’t hard to conclude what the text is about, the tone and the author’s attitude towards the situation described in the excerpt. It is obvious that the author is in a bookstore, browsing through books while waiting to read from her own published work in front of the people. During that time, she remembers being a student, “recalling her past sins”, remembers reading CliffsNotes herself and finally finding herself flipping through the pages of her own book.

The text is not hard to understand, however, some difficulties might appear during the translation. I used Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (8^th edition), Wikipedia.com, Google.com and the notes from the previous class. Some potential problems during the translation may be:

1. CliffsNotes- not all people know what CliffsNotes are (students and young people are expected to know this) so the question is whether we should transcribe it, as many people may not understand what it means, or translate it into something more closer to the reader. I choose to transcribe them even though it could be translated into Serbian as sažeta izdanja.
2. The Joy Luck Club- it is, as I already mentioned, the title of Tan’s most famous book. During translation I ran into 2 different translations, one being Klub sretnih žena (1994) and the other one being Klub radosti sreće (2005). I choose the newer one even though, I must say, the first translation sounds more appealing. Of course there is also another option and that is transcribing the title.     
3.  Former honors English major- titles are, most probably, a problem that translator will be facing every time he starts his translation. Titles in other countries, in this case America, differ from titles in our own country. Literally, this would sound bivši diplomac engleskog jezika. However, words bivši diplomac didn’t sound good for me, it was like she used to have that diploma and now she doesn’t, and that’s not the case. So I choose to translate it in a more general way: bivši student engleskog jezika.
4.       .     Self-proclaimed as “your key to the classics”- this statement refers again to CliffsNotes. Of course if a person does not know what CliffsNotes are, he/she might translate it literally as vaš ključ do klasika. But this kind of translation is inappropriate in the sense that it does not match with the meaning of CliffsNotes and their purpose. In that case, some research should be made. Since I had no difficulties with that as I already knew what CliffsNotes are, I translated it as samozvane kao vaš vodič kroz klasike. 
5.   In page after chilling page- this expression was quite ambiguous for me and I think I wouldn’t manage to translate it if it weren’t for the notes from our previous class. It is impossible to say that pages are chilling so it is obvious that the sentence has deeper meaning. On our previous class, we agreed that this chilling word has nothing to do with pages but with the author’s feelings while flipping through the pages of her own book. So I translated it as: sve više sam osećala jezu. 

Before I handed in my translation I read it twice to make sure I didn’t make any mistakes. I didn’t change anything. The text itself is not hard to understand. I read it several times and I left some of the expressions I found hard for the last. Notes and discussion from the class really helped me and made my translation easier. If it weren’t for these notes, it would certainly take me much more time to figure out what some of these expressions refer to. Beside these tricky expressions I wouldn’t say the text was hard. Since we did some more challenging translations, I would say this one is 5 on a scale from 1 to 10.

Assignment 3 ( Iain Banks, Complicity )

Iain Banks, born on 16 February 1954, is a Scottish writer. He writes mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain Menzies Banks. The Times named Banks in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Complicity, a detective fiction and a little bit of a gothic story, was first published in 1993.

Its two main characters are Cameron Colley, a journalist, working for Scottish newspaper called The Caledonian, and a serial murderer whose identity is a mystery. Colley is living in Edinburgh. He smokes cigarettes and cannabis, drinks copious amounts of alcohol, plays computer games and has adventurous sex with a married woman. He regrets his addictions and misdemeanors and tries half-heartedly to give them up. He receives anonymous phone calls about a series of mysterious deaths. Suddenly he has mysterious deaths of his own to worry about when an editorial he wrote several years before comes back to haunt him. It seems someone is killing off the people on his list, one by one. Under suspicion by the police, Colley finds himself involved in the bizarre murders when the killer is revealed. 

The passages dealing with Colley, the journalist, are written in the 1st person and those dealing with the murderer in the 2nd person. ( it seems like we are looking through killer's eyes)

Before starting my translation, I read an excerpt twice. It was a little bit strange for me that narration is in the 2nd person so I did a little research on the internet and found out that the entire novel is a mixture of 1st and 2nd person narration. According to the number of information given in the excerpt and the style of writing, it wasn't hard to conclude what the main idea of the text is. In this passage in particular, it is a mysterious murderer who is waiting for the owner of the house to come ( probably to kill him). Because of the 2nd person narration, we, as readers, are enabled to witness all the events and see them through killer's eyes. 

During the translation I used Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary ( 8th edition), Wikipedia.com, Google.com and the notes of the analysis done in the previous class. Of course, I had difficulties during translation as not all words in the text have their equivalents in Serbian so I tried hard to translate them in a descriptive way. Some of the problems were: 

1. a small telephone seat : this type of a phrase doesn't have its equivalent in Serbian, such thing doesn't exist in Serbian, so I translated it descriptive stoličica pored telefona.

2. eyes white in the half- darkness : we analysed this problem in class, stating it was impossible for eyes to be seen in the dark, it was sclera ( or white of the eye) that the writer is referring to, so having known that, I translated it in Serbian as beonjača as it is the only part of an eye that can be seen in the half-darkness.

3. the maid has pissed herself : this style of writing is quite colloquial, informal. Later on in the text, writer used the word "urine", this word being more formal. However, after a discussion we had in class I translated it as Služavka se upiškila, whereas the word "urine" I didn't translate as urin ( as this word can only be heard in medicine, by doctors) but as mokraća.

4. still- warm Aga : Wikipedia.com : The Aga cooker is a stored-heat stove invented in 1929. This type of cooker corresponds to our smederevac ( if we want to use colloquial style as well) or simply šporet, being more general. 

5. Pronoun YOU : during the analysis on the class, we concluded there are several ways we can interpret this text: it can be translated in the 2nd person singular, 3rd person singular or even 2nd person plural. I choose 3rd person singular. 

The text is not hard to translate, it seems easier than the previous ones, so on a scale from 1 to 10, I would say 5. It is very important to understand the text because only in that way you will be able to translate it properly and save the originality of the work and the main idea that the writer tried to convey.