c'est une histoire qui a pour lieu
Nov. 13th, 2002 01:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
incandescensWhy do French musical writers have to hire bad English translators? I've been reading a review of the production of Romeo and Juliet which has just opened in London, brought over from Paris (where it was Romeo et Juliette, of course) where it apparently did very well. The music's not bad, either; I have the CD (of the French version). However, one of the review's major targets for abuse is the libretto, which is, by all accounts, appalling.
Well now. I remember when Notre-Dame de Paris, after a huge success in Paris, came over and got a translation and hit the London stage. The translation then was certainly appalling. I went and bought the CD of the English version -- all right, all right, so it had most of the same singers as the French version, so it wasn't actively painful -- and saw it, twice. The lyrics ranged from tolerable to banal. It still frustrates me. They really were that bad. (For reference, Notre-Dame de Paris did tolerably well on the London stage, if not brilliantly, but closed not long after 9/11, when the tourist trade slowed down.)
There must have been better translators around. Les Mis managed to get a tolerable translation. Why not these two?
Tch. Trip one of my switches and I react very predictably.
---
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
-- James D. Nicoll
Well now. I remember when Notre-Dame de Paris, after a huge success in Paris, came over and got a translation and hit the London stage. The translation then was certainly appalling. I went and bought the CD of the English version -- all right, all right, so it had most of the same singers as the French version, so it wasn't actively painful -- and saw it, twice. The lyrics ranged from tolerable to banal. It still frustrates me. They really were that bad. (For reference, Notre-Dame de Paris did tolerably well on the London stage, if not brilliantly, but closed not long after 9/11, when the tourist trade slowed down.)
There must have been better translators around. Les Mis managed to get a tolerable translation. Why not these two?
Tch. Trip one of my switches and I react very predictably.
---
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
-- James D. Nicoll
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no subject
Date: 2002-11-12 05:47 pm (UTC)So clearly, you need to translate more stuff!
no subject
Date: 2002-11-13 08:45 am (UTC)One of the regulars on rec.arts.sf.composition is an Italian lady who translates a lot of books from English to Italian (she's working on Bujold's Komarr at the moment) and the other day she talked about the problem of translating something for which there is no direct idiomatic equivalent in Italian (and it was something ordinary in English, like "Doesn't she get a vote?"). It came down to what anacrusis was saying: a good translation has to be effectively a sentence-by-sentence rewrite in the destination language.