Translation Styles
by Don Webb
João Ventura, a long-time veteran contributor to Bewildering Stories, has sent us some interesting examples of translations done by an automated program: ChatGPT. The computer program also provides an entertaining and, occasionally, somewhat self-congratulatory discussion.
The software has not only translated the original story, it also offers variants that range in style from “literary” to genteel horror. However, that procedure raises questions, in particular: How well does the translation represent the original? Does the translation favor a particular audience?
Those questions faced Bewildering Stories more than twenty years ago, when the critical translation of Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World was in progress. A footnote in Episode 1 explains why a literal translation would be unreadable. The original text has no chapters, the paragraphing is sparse, and the sentences often reflect the Baroque style of mid-17th century France.
And yet Cyrano’s audience in the Age of Reason was an educated elite that might have had interests similar to those of most of the world’s university faculty and students in the early 21st century. In his day, Cyrano was writing a philosophical novel of a kind that would flourish in the 18th century’s Age of Enlightenment. It was also a travel novel, a genre destined to become significant in the 18th century and, especially, the 19th century’s Age of Romanticism. Today, it is distinguished as a classic of early modern science fiction.
Today’s audience can trust that our translation does not create fanciful variants; it replicates the tone of the original but not literally. Rather it’s in a form accessible to readers of North American English some 350 years after Cyrano’s time.
I imagine Cyrano would approve. After all, his novel summarizes the history of flight in the 20th century — from balloons to aircraft to rocketry — more than 300 years in advance. And it anticipates other 20th-century inventions, as well. Heed the challenge, ChatGPT: what world-changing technology can you imagine emerging in the 24th century?
Turning to other works, we find that accuracy in translation can sometimes take various forms. For example: A reader wrote in to proclaim that some scholar had done an incommensurable — or words to that effect — translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s poem Le Dormeur du val — The Sleeper in the Vale. I had read that translation, myself, and had found it quite self-important. In contrast, Rimbaud’s poem is a remarkable example of lyrical plain speaking, and I had translated it accordingly.
A poem’s primary effect can be conveyed by its form. For example, La Fontaine’s La Cigale et la fourmi — The Cricket and the Ant can be translated by reproducing the rhythm of the two characters’ dialogue. The example at Bewildering Stories can’t go exactly word for word, of course, but the English version duplicates idiomatically what La Fontaine achieved in French.
Of course, literal word-for-word also has its place. Frank Wedekind’s Der Gefangene — The Prisoner plays a linguistic joke that is actually more complete in English than in the original German: “ein anderer” is masculine; the feminine would be: “eine andere.” Writing in German, the poet had to choose one or the other.
But English has no grammatical gender; therefore, a translator need not choose who or what “another” or “someone else” will be. In the English version of Wedekind’s poem: the hypothetical substitute or figment remains indefinite; it can be either male or female or, for that matter, anything else.
Would a politically or culturally reactionary form of ChatGPT insist that no male could or should imagine himself female or vice-versa? Possibly. But let refractory software clamor, if it feels it must, for society to conform to the rules in the North Germanic of the Angles and Saxons or even Old Norse; modern times offer other opportunities.
Copyright © 2025 by Don Webb
