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.