Translation blues

The most common Malaysian joke about translation is probably tahi suci, a literal rendering of ‘holy shit’ in Bahasa. Whether that was really the part of a cinema subtitle, or is merely another urban legend, is unclear. Another example often cited by cinema aficionados is tembak, tembak for ‘fire, fire’. Apparently, there were no guns involved in the story. (This problem is, by no means, confined to Malay. There are dozens of emails going around about Chinese translations. We were watching a presentation of the Beijing Opera at KLPac once. The organisers had helpfully decided to provide surtitles for the Cantonese illiterate, me included. Somewhere in the middle of the show, when an opera couple was frolicking in a make belief garden, a translation flashed, “... like butterflies fondling in the garden.” It was certainly a good rendering of the Chinese opera (for neophytes like me), but that translation simply took my breath away. I was speechless. “What ... what ... whaaat?”

Among the things we do to pay our rent, is the editing of works already translated from Malay to English. One of the earliest ones we did involved head-hunters in East Malaysia about 150 years ago. In one scene, the characters talk about a tiang belian, the ironwood main pillar of a longhouse, and this was translated as ‘purchased pillar’! Hah, you didn’t know that, did you? One hundred and fifty years ago, headhunters already had kedai runcit in the middle of the jungle selling pillars for longhouses! Then in another scene in the same novel, the hero is confronted by the leader of the hunters who beats and puffs his chest to show off  kejantananya. This was translated as ‘beat his chest and shows off his manhood ...’ Flasher ... flasher!

Do translators even read over their work before submission, or do they not know any better?

Since then, we have insist on having the Malay original with us when we edit. Can you imagine this going into the international market in that form? We pick out dozens of such boo-boos in almost every book. How about this one we came across recently: “... kami cuma ada sepasang anak lembu, satu jantan dan satu betina ...” translated as “... we only have a pair of cow children, one male and one female ...”

I swear, time stood still at that point. Oh my God, it was so bad, it’s good. An Olympic gold medalist? You bet.

Then there is the prose. How is this for starters: ... mengikut tradisi tradisional yang amat berdradisi (repeated about a 150 times throughout the book). That is ‘ ... following traditional traditions that are extremely traditional’. (One might be tempted to think that this is a sure winner at the Olympics of prose until one sees the rest.) I am not a Malay scholar. I admit my knowledge of the language is purely functional, but can anyone out there tell me that this is good Malay prose? How does one edit stuff like that?

Then there are writers who love the ‘bunga-bunga’ stuff. How about this one: “The little clusters of sadness had become an island of sorrow that squeezed her in the narrows of her old age.”

Hahhh?

I can hear some people go, “Isn’t it so-oo beautiful? Like poetry?” Really? Like poetry? I am no poet, but if that isn’t an insult to the form, I don’t know what is. As far as I know, poetry lives on the economy of words, and the preciseness of their usage. This, on the other hand, is built on verbosity, diarrhoea; a writer carried away with his or her cleverness. This is the kind of stuff fifteen-year-old schoolgirls and schoolboys write to impress their friends and teachers. Anyway, does the writer even know what he or she is trying to say? As a reader, I certainly don’t. I could pretend, of course, so as not to look stupid. Read a few hundred of those and see what it does to your sanity.

This is not confined to Malay prose, either. Not too long ago there was a book that compared an earring falling into a cereal bowl to a meteor. One customer said that, when she came across this passage on page 90, she decided she had had enough. Another tossed his book across the room. This author went on to win the Man-Booker Prize for that year. There certainly is no accounting for taste.

So what is good prose? Is it merely a matter of personal taste, then? As a publisher, I have been asked that often. What do I look for in a manuscript? Okay, let me try:

Good prose is one that does not obstruct the flow of the story, nor take the attention away from it, nor bury it under a pile of verbose crap. It is like a good computer operating system: user-friendly, easy to use and elegant. It remains unobtrusively in the background, getting the job of telling a good story without screaming out for attention like an obnoxious five-year-old, “Mummy, mummy, look what I have done. See how clever I am.” Good prose is not about the cleverness of the writer. If the writer is clever, it will show. Every word, every phrase and every sentence will have to satisfy the conditions of necessity and sufficiency to earn its right to remain on the page.

Some might say I set the bar too high. After all, we are only Malaysians.

Banish that thought if you are planning to send me a manuscript.