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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   852 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 15, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up al-Gharbi's We Have Never Been Woke. It's more scholarly and less popular than expected. The title apparently means that for all the woke signalling being done, actual wokeness is more about appearances and ambition than anything.

I just started Jane Austen’s Emma. I’ve been meaning to read more ”proper” books for a while and I recently watched and loved Clueless (1995) which turns out to be a very well regarded modernized adaptation of Emma to a 90s high school setting. Thus getting an annotated ebook seemed a natural choice (for the high, high, price of $4.50). Wish me luck, lol.

Some googling for translations has also revealed an interesting example of elitism in literary circles. People recoil at the very idea that someone would translate older English language Classics to modern late 1900s / 2000s English and tell you to just suck it up with the overly complicated sentence structure and completely changed meaning of words. However translating to a foreign language - which throws the sentence structure to wind and streamlines it significantly - is somehow perfectly fine. Goddamn elitists…

However, translating to a foreign language—which throws the sentence structure to the wind and streamlines it significantly—is somehow perfectly fine.

This sounds like a strawman to me. Plenty of people hate "streamlined" translations into other languages. "Localization" of Japanese games and anime into English has borne the brunt of this criticism, but I don't think it's unknown in other areas.

Esteemed writer Vladimir Nabokov (in the "translator's foreword" to his 1958 translation of A Hero of Our Time):

This is the first English translation of Lermontov's novel. The book has been paraphrased into English several times [footnote listing five works from 1854 to 1940], but never translated before. The experienced hack may find it quite easy to turn Lermontov's Russian into slick English clichés by means of judicious omission, amplification, and levigation; and he will tone down everything that might seem unfamiliar to the meek and imbecile reader visualized by his publisher. But the honest translator is faced with a different task.

In the first place, we must dismiss once and for all the conventional notion that a translation “should read smoothly” and “should not sound like a translation” (to quote the would-be compliments, addressed to vague versions, by genteel reviewers who never have read and never will read the original texts). In point of fact, any translation that does not sound like a translation is bound to be inexact upon inspection; while, on the other hand, the only virtue of a good translation is faithfulness and completeness. Whether it reads smoothly or not depends on the model, not on the mimic.

In attempting to translate Lermontov, I have gladly sacrificed to the requirements of exactness a number of important things—good taste, neat diction, and even grammar (when some characteristic solecism occurs in the Russian text). The English reader should be aware that Lermontov's prose style in Russian is inelegant; it is dry and drab; it is the tool of an energetic, incredibly gifted, bitterly honest, but definitely inexperienced young man. His Russian is, at times, almost as crude as Stendhal's French; his similes and metaphors are utterly commonplace; his hackneyed epithets are redeemed only by occasionally being incorrectly used. Repetition of words in descriptive sentences irritates the purist. And all this the translator should faithfully render, no matter how much he may be tempted to fill out the lapse and delete the redundancy.

When Lermontov started to write, Russian prose had already evolved that predilection for certain terms that became typical of the Russian novel. Every translator becomes aware, in the course of his task, that, apart from idiomatic locutions, the “from” language has a certain number of constantly iterated words that, though readily translatable, occur in the “into” language far less frequently and less colloquially. Through long use, these words have become mere pegs or signs, the meeting places of mental associations, the reunions of related notions. They are tokens of sense, rather than particularizations of sense. Of the hundred or so peg words familiar to any student of Russian literature, the following may be listed as being especial favorites with Lermontov:

[list of 13 Russian phrases, of which four are borrowed from French]

It is the translator's duty to have, as far as possible, these words reoccur in English as often, and as irritatingly, as they do in the Russian text. I say as far as possible because in some cases the word has two or more shades of meaning depending on the context. “A slight pause”, or “a moment of silence”, for instance, may render the recurrent “minuta molchan'ya” better than “a minute of silence” would.

How is it a strawman to say that the existence of foreign language translations is considered fine by people? I've certainly never seen a literature enthusiast who'd want to restrict others from reading translated works when they can't read the original language.

As for streamlining, the very act of translating English text to Finnish inherently changes the sentence structure because English and Finnish are in different language families and have completely different grammar. It's impossible to translate many forms of archaic English to Finnish without streamlining the sentence structure because proper Finnish doesn't have the same forms of very long tacked on sentences (there are some long sentences but they are different form and thus wouldn't be any more authentic than the streamlined ones).

Obviously poor quality translations are considered bad but that's the very reason why I wish someone would make slightly streamlined versions of English language classics. As it is, my options are 1) try to read the originals and give up because the text is too laborous and annoying to read (without a very good cause, ie. the language used was the norm for the era instead of being a dedicated stylistic choice as you'd find in some books that intentionally evoke the feel of archaic language), 2) read at best a middling quality translation (because they are old and done without access to proper understanding of the source material) or 3) hope a newer high quality translation exists (eg. Pride and Prejudice has been translated by Kersti Juva who's renowned for her outstanding Tolkien translations). Given the lack of option 3, how is it better to either prevent me from reading the book in the first place or to force me to read a subpar translation (that gets say 70% there) instead of allowing me (and everyone else without requiring N different translations) to read a slightly modernized version that's 95% accurate to the original? (and will result in outright better comprehension and appreciation of the text because it uses the words in their modern meaning instead of 200 year old outdated meaning that will cause misunderstandings)

And if you think the existence of people who think that is a strawman, take a look at this and this comment in thus subthread which are essentially saying just that.

How is it a strawman to say that the existence of foreign language translations is considered fine by people?

I didn't say merely "translations into other languages". I specifically said "'streamlined' translations into other languages".

As for streamlining, the very act of translating English text to Finnish inherently changes the sentence structure because English and Finnish are in different language families and have completely different grammar. It's impossible to translate many forms of archaic English to Finnish without streamlining the sentence structure because proper Finnish doesn't have the same forms of very long tacked on sentences (there are some long sentences but they are different form and thus wouldn't be any more authentic than the streamlined ones).

Streamlining should be kept to an absolute minimum. I know approximately nothing about Finnish, so I can't say anything more there. But see the Nabokov quote that I now have been able to add to my previous comment for his thoughts on Russian–English translation.

Obviously, poor-quality translations are considered bad

"Quality" is a meaningless buzzword.

Obviously, inaccurate translations are considered bad, but that's the very reason why I wish someone would make slightly streamlined versions of English language classics.

Streamlining and accuracy are inherently opposed to each other. The more streamlining a person does, the more he becomes a paraphraser (or a localizer) rather than a translator. Again, see the Nabokov quote.

Also: To clarify, I am not opposed to the creation of streamlined/inaccurate translations/paraphrases/localizations, as long as they are clearly labeled as such rather than being passed off by their publishers as truly accurate.

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