Martin Boyd

Lorde: another victim of ethnocentric violence

Last October, Feministing blogger Verónica Bayetti Flores launched a scathing attack on the song “Royals”, one of the biggest hits on US radio in 2013, for lyrics that Bayetti claimed are “deeply racist”. Bayetti’s argument was based on the assertion that the song’s critique of extreme wealth draws specifically on images associated with African-American hip hop stars (“gold teeth”, “Cristal”, “Maybachs”), with no specific references that might conjure up images of white American wealth (why, for example, does the song make no reference to “golf”, “polo” or “Central Park East”?). Bayetti’s argument might have had some validity if it weren’t for one very important fact that she completely elides in her analysis of the song: Lorde, the 16 year-old singer-songwriter responsible for “Royals”, is from New Zealand.

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Martin Boyd

As with all forms of professional writing, proofreading is an essential element in translation, as a second pair of eyes is often able to pick up minor (or sometimes major!) errors in the translated text that translators can miss in their own work, even when they’ve carefully proofread their work themselves. Unfortunately, most translator training programs dedicate very little time to instructing translators in how to handle proofreading tasks, which may end up involving a large proportion of their work as freelancers. With this in mind, based on my own experience as a translator, proofreader and translation project manager, I have developed a kind of “crash course” in proofreading translations, which basically consists of the following four simple rules:

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Martin Boyd

Edith Grossman, the English translator of many of the works of Gabriel García Márquez and author of the book Why Translation Matters, an examination of the low profile of translation in the English-speaking world, remarks that in book reviews of translated works, “most critics assiduously ignore the fact that they are reviewing a translation. If they do refer to the translation, they usually dismiss it with a phrase like ‘ably translated by’.” (qtd. in Salisbury).

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Martin Boyd

In an article published in 1987, prominent literary translator Margaret Sayers Peden took issue with Hileman’s translation of Carlos Fuentes’ classic novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz, accusing him of “total, and incredibly insensitive, restructuring” of the source text, completely undermining Fuentes’s original intention (“Translating the Boom” 170). Indeed, Hileman does appear to show an almost cavalier disregard for the punctuation and paragraphing of the original text, eliminating points of ellipsis, periods and commas and inserting paragraph breaks and lexical connectors in an apparent effort to ‘regularize’ Fuentes’s deliberately irregular style. But there is another apparently systematic omission in Hileman’s translation that Sayers Peden does not identify. That she overlooks it is not surprising, because her analysis is exclusively concerned with aesthetic questions and the omission to which I refer has implications that are more ideological than poetological.

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Martin Boyd

Ignacio López Tarso in a Mexican adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”.

In her article, “Performability versus Readability”, Greek-Canadian translator and translation scholar Ekaterini Nikolarea offers a historical overview of the development of what she calls a “theoretical polarization” in theatre translation, between the notions of “performability” and “readability”. In doing so, she places two authors – theatre theorist Patrice Pavis and translation studies scholar Susan Bassnett – in opposition against one another, as spokespeople for the two conflicting perspectives.

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