How trust worthy are translated books?
I am reading a translated (into spanish) Lous L'amour book about the old west entitled "El hombre de las colinas quebradas."
Which apparently means something like "the man from the broken hills."
But, anyway, I want to know if anyone has experience with translated books by this company "Mercedes Lamamié de Clairac."
Are they fairly well translated?
If you don't have experience with this company what about other companies?
4 Answers
There are two broad approaches to translation - Dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence.
When a translator prefers to translate the 'sense' or feeling of a sentence into the destination language, they will use dynamic equivalence. When they want to show the literal meanings of the source text, they will use formal equivalence. In practise, a translator will switch between both as they see fit. In this sense, your question about something being 'well translated' is difficult to answer.
For me, when reading a novel, I would prefer to get the feeling translated (ie. dynamic equivalence) rather than the literal meaning. But if I was reading something more objective like history or science, I would prefer a more formal transation.
Hope this helps !
Well... it depends on the translator, of course. I've read a few books both in Spanish and in English (not too many; I normally read it only in either one), and I got practically the same feeling from both, so I'd say the translation was rather good. But I don't discard the possibility that a book is badly translated, of course.
Sorry, I am not familiar with that company.
Stu's explanation is good but I'll add a simple (trivial) example of the difference. Suppose that the Spanish has "buenos días", and the question is "how to translate this?". To use Stu's terminology, the "dynamic equivalence" approach yields "Hello". The "formal equivalence" produces "Good day(s)". Obviously nobody says "good days" in English but this does allow the matching up of the Spanish words with the English (and preserves the grammatical relationships).
If the intent is to convey the meaning, "hello" works very well but if your intent is to display the underlying grammar/structure of the Spanish phrase it is not so good. The basic objective of translators of novels/poetry/song lyrics is to convey the meaning {although this may require departing from the literal text).
The basic goal of many language texts is to make clear the grammatical similarities/differences of some translation. In these cases, the result needn't be what one would usually say, it is sufficient that the result is something that one could say (in other words, acceptable/understandable English).
Thus the short answer to your question (about trustworthiness) depends on the kind of translation you seek.
The usual practice is for a translator to translate into his own language. So, in this case the translator is probably a native speaker of Spanish and it is very unlikely that you will get "weird" Spanish. there may, however, be parts where the translator didn't understand what the original author meant and, as a result, mis-translate.
