Translating made-up words
July 21, 2017 3:05 AM Subscribe
A question for professional translators: (when) is it acceptable to make up a word in the language into which you're translating? Major spoilers for Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis inside!
In the most recent Vampire Chronicles book by Anne Rice, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis, Lestat and the other vampires are questioning a group of strange humanoid entities. Their de-facto leader, Kapetria, tells the story of how they were created by alien beings, and says something like:
"The closest translation in your language for what they called us would be 'Replimoids'."
This has bugged me since I read the book, because 'Replimoids' is not an English word; it's one that Rice made up just for this book. It seems wrong to call that a translation! But today I wondered if I've been unfair to Kapetria. With the understanding that she's a fictional, immortal, alien-created humanoid and not a professional translator, I would like to know: is it ever appropriate for a translator to just make up a word in the target language, and if so, under what circumstances?
Thanks!
In the most recent Vampire Chronicles book by Anne Rice, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis, Lestat and the other vampires are questioning a group of strange humanoid entities. Their de-facto leader, Kapetria, tells the story of how they were created by alien beings, and says something like:
"The closest translation in your language for what they called us would be 'Replimoids'."
This has bugged me since I read the book, because 'Replimoids' is not an English word; it's one that Rice made up just for this book. It seems wrong to call that a translation! But today I wondered if I've been unfair to Kapetria. With the understanding that she's a fictional, immortal, alien-created humanoid and not a professional translator, I would like to know: is it ever appropriate for a translator to just make up a word in the target language, and if so, under what circumstances?
Thanks!
This happens all the time when translating literature, especially in genres like sci-fi and fantasy that often need to describe things that don't exist in our world. Different translators certainly have their own take on it, and some decisions may be made based on the target audience or the flexibility of the target language to coin words, or based on the desire to maintain a foreign atmosphere in the translated text, etc. There are a lot of ways to approach it.
Harry Potter has some good examples, and a lot of people are familiar with it. I'm only familiar with the English, Dutch, and Japanese versions, but the Dutch version is MUCH heavier on coinages and alterations to names and objects in order to capture the feeling of the word, while still making it into something more Dutch-sounding. Hogwarts becomes Zweinstein, Muggles are Dreuzels, Slytherin is Zwadderich, and so on. These are translated with the assumption that Dutch readers will get the same emotional response that English readers get from these words. For example, "hog" is comedic and kind of goofy, "wart" is ugly and evocative of some kind of herb witches might use, and for Dutch readers "zwein" is like a goofy old-timey version of the word for swine, plus it gets a sort of ominous German tone that rhymes.
Japanese, on the other hand, does almost none of that, so they just transliterate the names for the most part. This means Hogwarts is still Hogwarts, just pronounced how you would pronounce it in Japanese. Even the words that are translated are pretty boring in comparison, since it's hard to get a pun like "Floo Powder" to work. That one just ended up being literally "chimney flying powder," with a superscript over the word giving the phonetic transcription of "floo powder." Part of this is that the way words are formed in Japanese makes it harder to pun in the same way as English, and part of it is that the translator wanted a story set in England to feel foreign for readers in Japan.
So my justification for this wording (not sure if Rice really thought it through) would be that the word Kapetria is translating was made up of parts from an even older language, and those parts meant something like what "repli" + "oid" would mean if used in English, evoking the same scientific, old-fashioned, objective quality that Greek words can have in English.
posted by wakannai at 3:45 AM on July 21, 2017 [20 favorites]
Harry Potter has some good examples, and a lot of people are familiar with it. I'm only familiar with the English, Dutch, and Japanese versions, but the Dutch version is MUCH heavier on coinages and alterations to names and objects in order to capture the feeling of the word, while still making it into something more Dutch-sounding. Hogwarts becomes Zweinstein, Muggles are Dreuzels, Slytherin is Zwadderich, and so on. These are translated with the assumption that Dutch readers will get the same emotional response that English readers get from these words. For example, "hog" is comedic and kind of goofy, "wart" is ugly and evocative of some kind of herb witches might use, and for Dutch readers "zwein" is like a goofy old-timey version of the word for swine, plus it gets a sort of ominous German tone that rhymes.
Japanese, on the other hand, does almost none of that, so they just transliterate the names for the most part. This means Hogwarts is still Hogwarts, just pronounced how you would pronounce it in Japanese. Even the words that are translated are pretty boring in comparison, since it's hard to get a pun like "Floo Powder" to work. That one just ended up being literally "chimney flying powder," with a superscript over the word giving the phonetic transcription of "floo powder." Part of this is that the way words are formed in Japanese makes it harder to pun in the same way as English, and part of it is that the translator wanted a story set in England to feel foreign for readers in Japan.
So my justification for this wording (not sure if Rice really thought it through) would be that the word Kapetria is translating was made up of parts from an even older language, and those parts meant something like what "repli" + "oid" would mean if used in English, evoking the same scientific, old-fashioned, objective quality that Greek words can have in English.
posted by wakannai at 3:45 AM on July 21, 2017 [20 favorites]
+1 to wakannai. The translation should, ideally, evoke the same response in the reader as the original text did, and if the original text had a made-up word, there's a strong case to be made for putting a made-up word in the translation.
Jabberwocky is another example of this. It's been translated into a number of languages, and that's not including some Japanese translations that I posted to my own site. There's really no way to do justice to the source text without making up a bunch of words, and it's interesting to see where translators transliterate words and where they invent words, and how they invent words. For example, most of the Japanese translations transliterate "toves" but invent new words for "slithy" that are almost but not quite real Japanese words, like ぬめらか (numeraka) or しなねば (shinaneba).
I recall reading Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which was beautifully translated, and the translator included some made-up words like "tetrapylectomy" (the art of splitting a hair four ways). I don't know Italian, but I assume the original included a made-up word using Greek roots as well. Working between languages that can draw on a shared reserve of linguistic roots is admittedly pretty easy.
And in some cases, translators have invented words to express ideas that aren't well represented in the target language, even though the source text was not using a neologism. The Japanese word for "economy," 経済 (keizai), was invented by a translator in the 1600s. The characters used to form it literally mean "light materials," and I remember how counterintuitive that seemed when I first learned the word—it only made sense once I took an econ course.
And don't even get started on straight-up borrowings. Languages tend to be pretty promiscuous about borrowing from other languages. France has the Académie française to regulate its language, but it's been fighting a rearguard action against anglicisms, and comes up with neologisms that people can use instead.
posted by adamrice at 8:12 AM on July 21, 2017 [1 favorite]
Jabberwocky is another example of this. It's been translated into a number of languages, and that's not including some Japanese translations that I posted to my own site. There's really no way to do justice to the source text without making up a bunch of words, and it's interesting to see where translators transliterate words and where they invent words, and how they invent words. For example, most of the Japanese translations transliterate "toves" but invent new words for "slithy" that are almost but not quite real Japanese words, like ぬめらか (numeraka) or しなねば (shinaneba).
I recall reading Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which was beautifully translated, and the translator included some made-up words like "tetrapylectomy" (the art of splitting a hair four ways). I don't know Italian, but I assume the original included a made-up word using Greek roots as well. Working between languages that can draw on a shared reserve of linguistic roots is admittedly pretty easy.
And in some cases, translators have invented words to express ideas that aren't well represented in the target language, even though the source text was not using a neologism. The Japanese word for "economy," 経済 (keizai), was invented by a translator in the 1600s. The characters used to form it literally mean "light materials," and I remember how counterintuitive that seemed when I first learned the word—it only made sense once I took an econ course.
And don't even get started on straight-up borrowings. Languages tend to be pretty promiscuous about borrowing from other languages. France has the Académie française to regulate its language, but it's been fighting a rearguard action against anglicisms, and comes up with neologisms that people can use instead.
posted by adamrice at 8:12 AM on July 21, 2017 [1 favorite]
But "replimoid" doesn't do that, because it doesn't look like an English formation at all. I'm not sure what these beings are, but there's no "replim-" stem, no "-moid" suffix, and I don't think "m" is often used to bridge together phonetically incompatible stem-endings and suffix-beginnings. So whatever they're like, "replimoid" wouldn't describe them because it doesn't describe anything. Compare to, say, "replicant," which is clearly using Latin roots to describe "something which is replicated," i.e., "something which is a copy of something else," i.e., a clone.
posted by praemunire at 8:59 AM on July 21, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by praemunire at 8:59 AM on July 21, 2017 [2 favorites]
Douglas Hofstadter wrote extensively about this very idea in Gödel, Escher, Bach.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 9:01 AM on July 21, 2017
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 9:01 AM on July 21, 2017
"Inventing" words is 100% kosher. Read up on derivational morphology. "Replimoid" is a pretty crummy example, though, for reasons ably stated above.
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:52 PM on July 21, 2017
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:52 PM on July 21, 2017
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