Quality of the translation (1400 words)

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Wanderlog

An alien from a distant planet
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We're translating an SF novel into English. As the source language differs significantly from English, we've encountered many challenges. The biggest one is a narration technique that looks like a cross between traditional inner speech (= voiced thoughts of the character) and usual author's narration. It works fine in the source language, but if it's translated literally, it confuses the readers as they simply don't understand who is speaking.

The solution to that challenge found by the translator is transforming such mixed narration into usual inner speech and marking it with italic without using quotation marks. I would appreciate it if you read the excerpt and tell how you comprehend it. Does it looks naturally in English? Or does it make the text more difficult to read?

Of course, other suggestions would be appreciated as well.

--------------------

“How is it going at work?”

Tsukka shrugged imperceptibly. She was in no mood to answer trite questions. Surely, Stepmother doesn't not even expect an answer. What can ever happen to a department-store salesgirl at work? Nothing but customers, shelves, shop windows, legs tired by the end of the day, and ever-hurting lips because of that artificial smile I have to wear all the time.

Absentmindedly she pushed the rice around the plate, picked a shrimp and put it into her mouth. How should I tell them? Dad really cares about me, and so does Stepmother – to an extent. Of course, Tanna's own children come first but she is genuinely trying to take care of me as well – insofar as it might be possible to take care of another person's child who has already come of age. Isn't it funny? It seems that the real challenge is not to make up my mind but rather to tell parents about your decision.

Stop this self-torture.” she scolded herself. “You have to tell them, and it has to be done today. So just bite the bullet and get it done. You have decided not to remain a burden anymore, haven't you? Good. Now just behave like a grown-up person you are.

“Dad! Mom.” She raised her head and put the fork on the table with a clang. “I want to tell you that...” She felt a lump in her throat and stopped short. One more sentence, and I shall be fully committed.

“Yes, my dear.” Father took his eyes off the newspaper. Rinrin and Tars stopped elbowing each other and were staring at their sister expectantly. Tanna did not react in any way as she kept chewing the rice. The stepmother seemed as exhausted as Tsukka herself. The girl felt a pang of guilt: after all, Tanna

was the one assuming responsibility for the household.

“I...Well, I decided it's time to move out. I am a grown-up and I earn my own living. Yesterday my sales manager said that my allowance would be raised...a bit. So...Well, I decided I could afford renting a room.”

“Don't be silly, dear.” Father shook his head in disapproval. “You already have a room in our apartment. Why waste money?”

He put the newspaper aside.

“I told you, Tsu: you aren't imposing. Yes, you a big girl – time sure does fly!But it doesn't mean you have to leave or we should throw you out. I know, you still can't get over this university flop. Never mind, a year will pass soon enough. Next winter you'll be accepted for sure!”

“Dad, you don't understand!” on the brink of tears, Tsukka clenched her fists. “I mean, I am really an adult. I must assume responsibilities. If I keep relying on you and Tanna, I won't be able to prepare for the exams as I should. I'll be doing nothing but drifting through life – your house, my husband's house, kids, kitchen, shopping... I want to become self-reliant!”

“You mean, you are leaving right now?” Father asked perplexedly. “Tanna, tell her!”

“I can but repeat what your Dad said: don't be silly, Tsukka.” the stepmother gave her a weary look. “True, sooner or later the young must leave the nest but there is no need to decide in such a rush. Even if you want to be on your own, you don't have to plunge headlong into your independence. Stay at least until tomorrow – it will be easier to move on your day off. Or maybe you'll give it another thought and decide to stay. Really, there is no urgency there.”

That's exactly what scares me: that I might think better of it and decide to stay. That I will run out of courage and give in to Dad's persuasion.

“No, I won' change my mind.” the girl shook her head. “Rinrin and Tars are already big enough to occupy separate rooms. Rinrin can move into mine, my bed will suit her well, and there is a desktop there, too. Me, I've packed my bag – took some bedding to last me at first, ok? - and I'll go now. Tomorrow I have a bonus day-off, I have earned a few by working overtime – that will help to settle down at the new place. If I stay until tomorrow, I won't get there before noon. The landlord won't be happy about it.”

“But Tsu...” Father blinked helplessly, and the girl shuddered suddenly realizing how old and shattered he was looking today. Oh, Dad, I hope you aren't struggling at work...

“No, Dad.” the girl moved her plate aside and got up with a look of determination on her face. “I have to. I am sorry it happened so...so suddenly but my mind is made.”

She went out of the kitchen, down the short hallway. The door to the left leads to her room. Her former room. Nothing has changed inside since yesterday but somehow the room was foreign to her. Not hers anymore.

She looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time. A low bed by the wall. A desktop right next to the window – looking orphaned now, without its usual stacks and piles of chaotically scattered paper and stuff. An ancient terminal – not even a terminal but a real computer with at length unused software once built into its bowels. Shelves with old and long forgotten paper-books, mostly juvenile – just in time for her siblings to start reading them – and some equally old textbooks clinging to each other: Physics for Undergraduate Applicants, Principles of Mathematics, Calculus... I should pick them up later. Or should I? I have already failed once as a result of using them for preparation: university training programs are different now, and modern training aids are all computer-based. So I'll have to save for a new terminal. On the floor, an old, threadbare carpet depicting a yellowish-green rhomb on a white background. A couple of chairs. A half-empty closet.

And a bag. A big travel bag, fully stuffed: several dresses, bedding and lingerie, a metal-plate engraving – a silver tree on a hill with a golden sunset in the background – shoes, a pelephone, and all those bits and pieces you somehow can not take heart to part with. An out-of-place foreign object that has turned her long-time shelter from life's trials and tribulations into a barely familiar room.

Stop it! Enough of that rubbing-in and self-torturing. What's done – done. Tsukka picked up the bag and, half-bent to one side because of its heavy weight, went out to the hallway. Her parents were already waiting there. Brother and sister, in a much quieter mood now, peeped out of the kitchen.

“Tsu,” her father put his hand on her shoulder and looked at her sadly. “Maybe you'll reconsider? At least, stay until tomorrow.”

He drew back and looked into her eyes, “You won't forget us, will you? You will visit? Call?”

“Yes, Dad.” - She nodded fighting off impending tears. “I will, for sure. And you come to visit me, too.”

She put her sandals on quickly, flung the door open, picked up her bag and went out. On the stairs she turned her head to look at her family one more time. Her father, stepmother, brother and sister were looking at her through the door-frame – as if from a different life, one that was sweet and reassuring.

In that life the child that she was could run to her father, climb onto his knees and, weeping bitterly, show him her finger with a black shadow of a splinter under a nail. In that life the golden light coming out of the windows in the evening darkness promised a safe shelter from miseries and foes. In that life the morning sun would dazzle her sleepy eyes, and the ticking alarm-clock on the table would lull her gently to slumber.

It's all gone. The future is cold and unsure, and, to begin with, I will have to learn how to live alone. I will return to my dark and empty room in a big house, greet my neighbours – lonely girls like myself – in the hallway of our shared apartment, pay my rent once in a timespan to the indifferent landlord, and pay my bills. That's the future I'll have to get used to.

She waved her farewell and trudged down the stairs.
 
I didn’t have any problem knowing who was speaking and when, but I did have problems. Why is the Stepmother called Stepmother? Why not a name, which I would assume is what would happen in real life. There is a lot of telling in the piece with odd and over worked emotional responses, or were for me anyway. I found the dialogue very un-natural and long winded. Finally, the pace of the section was very slow and for me, nothing really happened. This is 1,400 words and I honestly don’t know what the point is. I feel you need to be more concise and to the point, and give the reader an idea of the plot to come. Every word should bring value or cut those words out. I think this section could have been covered with a lot less words. Pace is the biggest problem for me, it needs to move on and have exciting stuff happen to your characters.

Sorry mate, but that is what I think.
 
Why not a name, which I would assume is what would happen in real life.
Or an alternate title such as Mater.
Person's name
a nickname
Mum, Mom, Mam, Mammy Mother or Mater
(depends on age of child when father remarries. If Teenage then Mary, Joan etc if baby then Mummy etc)
Never heard of any one referred to directly as Stepmother, only in 3rd party explanations ...
 
There are a couple of spelling and punctuation issues - but IMO the main problem with this piece is that it's so slow - and nothing really seems to happen.

You jump straight into infodumping, and spend three - alebit short - paragraphs on it, which kills the pace from the start.

But then the next 1000 words are devoid of tension - we just get a long exchange where Tsukka announces she's moving out, her parents seem cheerfully against it, but in the end, she's determined to continue. We see nothing of how Tsukka reached this decision, or why, merely that it is.

The internal thoughts come across as superficial and overly melodramatic, and don't really seem to actually say much.

IMO you could really improve on this by condensing this and improving the pace - keeping close the actual story, and making the character experience more believable.

And it has to be said - though it is an achievement to write in a foreign language, this piece still comes across very much as a translation of something else, and not very professionally done either. If you are aiming for English-speaking markets then I think you are going to really need to address this. However, we've had this issue come up before, and the advice given has always been to try and write competently for your own language market, and try to become a success in that. It's the job of professional translators to translate between different language markets, precisely because it is such a difficult task.

2c.
 
Firstly, I can't see the any issue with the italics - it's how direct thoughts are commonly shown. However, the whole piece could be tightened eg - she didn't respond as she kept putting the rice in her mouth - she kept eating is enough to tell us she didn't respond.

On the whole, there are a lot of punctuation errors, particularly around dialogue. As they are repeated it would seem the rule is not understood, rather than it being a typo.
So....

If you go to an action you need to end the dialogue with a full stop inside the quote marks, and then go to a capital letter.

Eg "like this." She stood and...

Also, why do we switch from using her name to the distancing the girl? It all seems in her point of view.

So, I think to answer your question, in terms of if it reads as a polished english piece of work, no, it doesn't. Sorry.
 
Heck, I think I need a translator / Editor for USA and I'm a native English speaker (I probably also need professional translation & edit for England too). :)
 
Okay, to answer your questions without getting to far into the hornets nest of the style choices in the whole piece.

The internal thoughts would work for me either way. Meaning with italics or without italics and absolutely no quote marks.

What doesn't work for me is the problem where this is third person narrative with first person thoughts. If you are going to get into the persons thoughts while in third person it would work better for me if you tried to refrain from dropping it into a first person narrative around those thoughts. Instead of the thoughts identifying the character as I, I would try to identify the character by name as if the third person narrator has dug into that characters thoughts. Or when possible structure the sentences to where they don't require any identifiers.

Such as::
Nothing but customers, shelves, shop windows, legs tired by the end of the day, and ever-hurting lips because of that artificial smile I have to wear all the time.
could be:
Nothing but customers, shelves, shop windows, legs tired by the end of the day, and ever-hurting lips because of that artificial smile worn all the time.

Pushing the thoughts into first person is disruptive and then putting them into italics in such a large block just causes further distraction.

Kept in third person with no italics should be easy for the reader to figure out. They are a lot smarter than we give them credit.

If the whole piece were in first person then the first person internal thoughts would work just fine.

Lastly I would agree that there are elements present that make me think this is a poor translation, no offence meant to the translator because for all I know those elements might exist in the original document.
I recently read a novel that sounded like a poor translation but was likely not translated at all so I might have to agree with @Ray McCarthy that some people who speak and write English need to have translators depending which English speakers they are addressing.
 
Thank you everyone for your comments. They are very valuable, and I'll take them to heart.

Some additional comments:

1) I'm the author, not the translator. I work with a professional translator (he's a native English speaker), and this is just a preliminary version of the text. It would be too bold for me to translate the text on my own.

2) The main purposes of this episode are (1) introducing a character and justifying her further behavior and (2) giving the reader an opportunity to relax a little after the previous tense episode with extended technology descriptions, big explosions, unsolved mysteries and so on. The next episode contains descriptions of tortured children, murders and so on, so it's all right with the speed of the events in this particular episode. I chose this episode as the example because it contains a lot of italicized text.

3) Switching between third and first person views (narration and personal feelings) is non-existent in the original. The virtual camera depicting the events stays in the same position all the time. It simply provides additional feedback from time to time. As I said, it works fine in the source language. However, when translated into English, it can create problems.

In general, this is a tiny part of a huge SF novel, the first one in the series of 5 novels, and the target audience for this text are people who can enjoy reading long stories that contain not only energetic and fast actions. There are a lot of reminiscences, personal feeling are exposed very often, big episodes are fully devoted to fleshing out characters, sometimes the text turns into an outright melodrama, and so on. If someone is interested, I can give the link to the already translated part of the text (about 25%), but right now I'm most interested in the linguistic part of the translation.

Why is the Stepmother called Stepmother?

The cultural background of the universe is somewhat Japanese-based, and it's the rule in Japan to address older members of the family according to their family role (nee-san - older sister, okaa-san - mother, and so on).

There are a couple of spelling and punctuation issues

Such as?

if you know two or more languages, translation TO your NATIVE is always far better than the reverse.

Agreed. However, my goal is translating my text into English, not translating other's texts into my language. ;) That's why I'm working with a native speaker.

If the whole piece were in first person then the first person internal thoughts would work just fine.

Maybe. However, it would require major rewriting of the entire text (or rather a dozen of novels if I am to continue translating), and this task is overwhelming.

there are elements present that make me think this is a poor translation

For example?
 
Spelling/punctuation - some has been pointed out in my crit. Dialogue punctuation is off throughout. Also, eg doesn't not - doesn't already includes the not

Tanna

was (paragraph interrrupted)

So...Well (needs four . To be a new sentence)

That sort of thing. :)
 
Jo Zebedee,

Minor mistypes will be corrected later. Punctuation - thank you, the point is taken.

He doesn't seem very good then

Er-r... could you please clarify it? What exactly (besides punctuation) is wrong? Any example?
 
Just had a quick look, and some of the text does have a slightly "stiff" feel to it, but I don't know that I would have picked it out as being a translation if I hadn't been told. I've certainly read stuff by native English speakers that had a similar feel -- On by Adam Roberts, for example. (In his case, I think it was a deliberate style choice to reflect the world.)

For a novel translation to work well, though, the translator would need to be an expert at writing fiction too, not just the original language author. Does this translator normally handle fiction, or more technical/diplomatic stuff? (That might answer the point about dialogue punctuation, which, let's face it, a lot of experienced native writers seem to have trouble with.)
 
Yes, a technical document translator would be perhaps useless. I wrote quite decent technical documents for very many years. I found when I turned to fiction that the most obvious thing was I hadn't a clue about dialogue. There were other problems too.
A translator for Fiction needs much more skill.
We didn't care about style at all (or punctuation) on tech documents that we used that were translations, as all that mattered was accuracy. We would have been using them as specifications or re-writing them.
 
Surely a professional translator to English would understand English Dialogue punctuation.

Well, translation and editing are slightly different things. :) I believe we'll tackle this problem.

I wrote quite decent technical documents for very many years. I found when I turned to fiction that the most obvious thing was I hadn't a clue about dialogue.

I hope I know at least something about building dialogues and fleshing out characters, so this is my responsibility. :) The main problem is, a non-native speaker like me has no hope to write a naturally looking text, and it's where the translator comes into play.

some of the text does have a slightly "stiff" feel to it

Thank you. I understand what you mean. Point taken.

but I don't know that I would have picked it out as being a translation if I hadn't been told

Thank you again. That's what interests me in the first place.

For a novel translation to work well, though, the translator would need to be an expert at writing fiction too, not just the original language author.

Correct. However, living on a distant planet, I have no chance to meet such a person. English-speaking experts in my language are rare birds by themselves, and the chance that it would be combined with proficiency in fiction writing is practically non-existent.

Does this translator normally handle fiction, or more technical/diplomatic stuff?

More technical stuff.
 
More technical stuff.
You need a different translator. A technical translator won't work even if you have your native language dialogue etc OK. Unless you are going to have an English developmental Editor too.

I've done 20 years technical writing. Totally unrelated to normal fiction / novels, my fiction writing quality was totally rubbish. After about 700,000 original words and up to 15 revisions on some of the novels now I'm merely poor.
 
@Wanderlog - You could still use the same translator, but they would need to get to speed on some of the issues specific to fiction writing. Something like The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes by Jack Bickam may be helpful to both of you on this point.
 
Rather than try to retrain the translator to write fiction, I think it would be easier to have the translation line-edited to take out the stiffness (and fix any errors). The process that would make most sense to me is:

1. Write book in original language.
2. Have that edited for structure, pace, characterisation etc.
3. Translate.
4. Have the translation line-edited for text "feel" and typos.

Obviously that involves two lots of editing, so it depends on your resources.
 
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