I saw this this morning in the London Independent and it brought to mind two things:http://bovary.univ-rouen.fr/

1. Online translation does not always work, the services that come through machines and people who have no empathy
with their subject matter curdle my blood.

2. When someone comes to a work of literature in translation it should be as close as possible to the original
(and better yet people should try to read as much literature as possible in the original):

Think you've read Madame Bovary? You've barely begun - News, Books - The Independent

Thanks to islands for this link :http://www.politics.ie/chat/56360-do...published.html

This issue came up on Poetry Ireland, where we compared some translations of Nagy online to the Hugh Maxton (Dedalus trans)
and the quality of the online translations was so effing bad that we are in effect depriving generations of readers who have not
yet discovered their literature/music/ art through diluting the sense of the artist by mass dissemination of art as product.

Between, By Agnes Nemes Nagy. Trans Hugh Maxton, Dedalus Press ,Dublin, Corvina Press Budapest.,

Reviewed here :http://www.poetryireland.ie/publicat...s/review3.html

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I had to remove bits cos I put a factual inaccuracy in bold. I think it wrong to reconstruct the original on the basis of
the censorship of the MSS btw- what went to press, went to press.

Imagine 123 people trying to rejig Finnegan's Wake ffs

Édition des manuscrits de Madame Bovary de Flaubert | Transcriptions | Classement génétique

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That's a good point. I often use free online translator | frengly.com to get some idea of what's going on in a webpage or piece of text in another language. It's quite handy for that, as long as you don't care about nuances of meaning, or rely on it to convey exactly what is meant.

But to see how it would butcher literature, I put a favourite poem in - Heaney's Postcript. It has pretty simple words and phrasing, so it should have a better chance than most of surviving translations


So if you take that and run it through only a few languages - I think I did French, German and Finnish, you get this

I mean it's interesting in some ways as an exercise. I like the flash flock of swans for instance, but yes, the poem is butchered in just four clicks of the mouse

I wonder if you did the same for a bad poem would it come out sounding more interesting?

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NAMA: Mortgaging our future to pay for the past.

Good idea - want to suggest one?

This is the Nagy discussion on PI. I can see that the project above has its merits, there were large sections excised from the book but the disclaimer published at link does little to justify how piecing together a jigsaw can take from what actually went to press (and from the writer)

'Zero Plane', from 'Terraced landscape', by Nagy. - Poetry Ireland Forum

There are two Nagy translations in this thread, the whole poem was also butchered and I cannot help but think that the digitalisation and translation projects have nothing to do with conservation of the originals but disseminating a product that is both inferior to the original and quite possibly wholly different in emphasis: thus depriving generations of the original.

A lot of work goes into original subject and themes both from writers and their translators.

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OK- I'm procrastinating here. Some random rubbish :
Becomes ...

Hmmmm ...

http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/f...translated.pdf
There's also a homepage on Translation and Linguistic Rights at PEN.

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I like the second one best (hee hee)

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Me too! There's a certain stalkerish obsessiveness about the hair must be connected to rubber bands