What is “exoticism” in translation ?
In my last blog entry, I used the term “exoticism”. However, I did not fully identify what that means. I would like to here.
Exoticism in translation refers to using words or phrases which sound “exotic” in the translated language, because they are of foreign origin. For instance, if I were translating the classic VW advertising text from the early 1990s, I might leave the German term for “the joy of driving” in German: “Fahrvergnügen”. VW left that word in its ad in English to emphasize that the car is German, and to give the reader (or listener) the notion of something unusual and exotic, to underline that the car is made in Germany, and thus has great engineering, etc.
If you were to imagine a range of translation options from -2 to 0 to +2, -2 might be a translation that is as close or “loyal” as possible to the German source text. Such a translation would emphasize that the text was written in German and would use such exoticisms lavishly. On the other hand, if one wanted to completely get rid of the origins of the text and make it as “user-friendly” for the reader as possible, one would remove all such exoticisms and replace them with colloquial terms that any American would readily understand. A +2 translation.
The standard taxonomy in translation looks like this:
-2 = Exoticism (very strong elements of source language + culture left in)
-1 = Cultural borrowing (minor source elements left in)
0 = Calque (a “balanced” translation that tries to tow a line between both cultures and languages)
+1 = Communicative translation (more toward the target language)
+2 = Cultural transplantation (source elements removed and complete loyalty to the target language; “as if never translated, with no hints of source language or culture)
When I was studying at university in Germany (Germersheim), my professors often emphasized this point. One had to make a decision to be loyal to the author of the text, or to be loyal to the reader. One of course can try to balance that.
The question is, when are you more loyal to one or the other. I think it depends on the context and situation. For very technical texts, where accuracy of content is “king”, it might be closer to -2 or -1. For marketing texts, closer to +2. It really depends.
This is why I also think that Google Translate is not a “perfect” solution for translation at a professional level. Google Translate is going to not make this decision, I think. It will either “spit back” whatever it has as “The Translation” for the source text (in its collective memory), or it is going to use its algorithms to aggregate what it thinks is the “safest” translation, which I suspect will either be a 0 or a +2 (in that range). But needless to say, the individual human decision will not be made to use exoticisms and be in the -1 to -2 range.
April 15, 2010 at 3:28 pm
Good stuff. Very interesting. I knew there was some discretion in translating and it was more of an art than a science, but I didn’t realize how much discretion is involved.