The omnivorous Bathrobe sent me these links:
1) How to Choose the Best Translation of the Iliad.
John Prendergast writes:
The one and only Iliad of Homer, the primordial, Western masterpiece of epic adventure about a pivotal battle during the Trojan War should transport readers through the mind of its long-dead composer to an earlier world, where heroes and heroines perform glorious deeds that have lived forever after in our collective memory, and where gods are indivisible from natural things. How well readers become transported depends on the quality and fidelity of translation. But how do you decide which translation of the Iliad to choose? Are you really reading what Homer said? Comparing the words of one against those of another leaves a reader blind. Choice must rely on taste or on which one seems to sound better. This critique is intended to open the eyes and reveal the quality and fidelity of eleven leading English translations by comparing passages from each to the original Homeric Greek.
2) MachineTranslation.com by Tomedes. Bathrobe writes:
It’s a site that compares translations by online machine translation services (such as Google Translate, DeepL, etc.), and gives each translation a score (by which they are then ranked). You can choose from quite a range of languages to translate from and to. I thought it was rather interesting.
Thanks, Bathrobe!
Having used MachineTranslation.com on a couple of occasions, I should point out that it has its shortcomings. One of the most glaring became apparent when I input a passage from German for translation into Mongolian. The highest ranked out of three translations was from ChatGPT, with a score of 8.2 out of 10. From what I can tell it was actually Ukrainian!
Use with great discretion.
The highest ranked translation (from ChatGPT), given a score of 8.2 out of 10, was actually Russian!
OK, that gave me a good laugh.
I thought it was Russian, but it looked odd. When I input the “Russian” into the original text field (text field for translation), it immediately identified it as Ukrainian. Perhaps someone with more knowledge could enlighten us. It wasn’t the only time that Russian-cum-Ukrainian was thrown into the mix.
The easy way to tell written Ukrainian from Russian is that Ukrainian has a dotted i. (It has a double-dotted ї as well, but that’s not as frequent.)
Yes, it had a dotted i. It also had the word його, which doesn’t look Russian to me.
Cut to the chase. Do we have a website that can simulate a reliable opinion on the best translation of the Iliad into Mongolian? Although I guess the question presumes the existence of multiple translations and maybe I shouldn’t assume that’s true.
This just asks for it:
ChatGPT (9.6):
(I omit it. It just cribbed the whole thing.)
ModernMT (8.5):
DeepL (8.4):
Microsoft (8):
Google (4):
Amazon (2):
Lingvanex (0.1):
IBM (0):
Seriously now, I looked at Prendergast’s site, and read some of the reasoning for his translation, to which he obviously dedicated years of thought. He writes,
However, whatever its merits may be,
is, in my opinion, not English.
It’s a stupid question: there isn’t a “best” translation of the Iliad. (If there were, I would probably nominate War Music, but I would have to say that Logue’s work is lacking in many attributes normally sought in translations.)
There isn’t a best translation of Beowulf or of the Divine Comedy either.
Is FitzGerald’s the best translation of Omar Khayyam? Best for what?
@DE: That’s why he says, “how to choose”, rather than choose one himself. He compares many points of style and accuracy, and lets you decide what you might like.
Given all that, I can’t understand how he came up with such a garbled thing as he did.
As a one-time student of Homeric Greek (with a gentleman’s B+ to show for it, the old gentleman’s C having been subject to grade inflation by then) I don’t think “countless” is the best English adjective for the second line. You certainly don’t have to stick with the English adjective etymologically derived from Homer’s word – viz. “myriad” – but uncountability (literal or hyperbolic) is a somewhat different emphasis than “quite a lot of.” Separately, I developed an affection for using an arguably-overliteral translation of the verb in that line as “piled up” or “heaped up” for what the wrath was doing with those many woes/pains.
When Prendergast writes “the original order of words has been preserved within limits allowed by English syntax,” he seems to have an idiosyncratic notion of what English syntax allows. Now, English poetry does permit certain deviations from standard word order conventions (which themselves often offer multiple options for a given potential sentence) that might seem obligatory in ordinary prose, but that poetic license is not limitless.
I get the feeling that he got carried away with “antiquing” the text, or what is called in the furniture trade “distressing”.
it’s not a proper pony, and it’s not a proper targum. a shetland hippogriff of a translation?
“Best for what?”
DE, for falling in love?:)
Or do we need criteria for this too?
I personally think poetic license allows anything. Or else Khlebnikov is not a Russian poet.
But it is good when at least someone (most commonly the author) can like the result, and achieving it is not always easy.
PS
and yes, його “him” is not a Russian word.
йог, йога, йогу, йогом, йоге “a yogi, of a yogi, to a yogi, …” are.
@Y, LH,
Y’s list includes somethign called ModernMT.
I never heard of it and its list contanst many languages (e.g. three Berbers: Kabyle, Central Atlas Tamazight, Tamasheq) – it even contains many languages whose names I don’t know.
I remember we discussed DeepL…. Has ModernMT ever been discussed here?
Their “human in the loop” option is a bit scary. You pay $15 per 1M characters (~two short novels, one longer novel, 200 pages of GT) and a professional translator checks in real time translations marked by the algorythm as unreliable. I’m thinking about a poor lady from Nepal checking my Tamazight to Russian, exploitation of child labour and things like that. The part about “a true symbiosis between humans and machines” is particularly scary. They aren’t going to implant anything in her brain or worse, connect several professional translators to form a cluster, are they? Well, I suppose it is good (their proposal, not clusters) – cash flows from those who need it less to those who need it more – but still scary.
I get the feeling that he got carried away with “antiquing” the text, or what is called in the furniture trade “distressing”.
In the antiquarian book trade there’s a jocular expression that sort of corresponds to the above:
‘bumped, rubbed, foxed, and goosed’.
I note that this Prendergast fellow is often quite sloppy in transliterating Greek to English: ν (Greek nu) often comes out as v, and ρ as p. Having come to the end of the long article, I find that he has set his self-published transation in…Comic Sans. The very thought of reading 15,000+ lines set in Comic Sans makes my eyes bleed.
Ah ya zein, from Arabic,
top, 9.6
Oh Zain oh Zain
Oh Zine El Abidine
Oh Ward Oh Ward is open between the orchards
Oh Ward Oh Ward is open between the orchards
Oh Zain oh Zain
Oh Zine El Abidine
Oh Ward Oh Ward is open between the orchards
Oh Ward Oh Ward is open between the orchards
Yama said Yama said
What do they say Al Awazil
Me me and my boyfriend are crazy
Me me and my boyfriend are crazy
Oh Zain oh Zain
Oh Zine El Abidine
Oh Ward Oh Ward is open between the orchards
Oh Ward Oh Ward is open between the orchards
With love love has its beauty that has fascinated me
Dobb treat my soul with his beautiful eyes
Dobb treat my soul with his beautiful eyes
Bottom, 0
Ah Zine ah flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love and love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love
_______
0 is better.
Actually, the best translation i’ve seen in years:)
I cannot possibly see how Prendergast’s bizarrely non-fluent translation is better poetry than, for example, this version I memorized without even intending to:
I think that one’s a pretty faithful translation, but it is also idiomatic English.
‘bumped, rubbed, foxed, and goosed’.
See Ronald Searle’s Anatomy of an Antiquarian Bookseller, on the web or on the wall of every dusty rare book shop.
@drasvi: I am not that familiar with Khlebnikov, although some English translations I googled up do not seem notable for (in English) weird word order as opposed to newly-coined words and unusual or opaque imagery. And Russian is typically said to be much more of a “free word order” language than English is, although of course some are at pains to point out that “free” is a misnomer if taken too literally.
But take an example: If you have twelve Russian words they can be ordered in 12! different possible sentences, which is quite a lot (almost half a billion). I highly doubt that 100% of those possible permutations are acceptable in Russian even as “poetic license” rather than incomprehensible word salad, but I suspect that more are acceptable in poetry than in prose (and that the percentage acceptable in prose is higher than it would be in English).
@Y “ See Ronald Searle’s Anatomy of an Antiquarian Bookseller, on the web or on the wall of every dusty rare book shop.”
I had the good fortune to escape that profession before acquiring more than about 63% of
the ailments in that glorious illustration.
I highly doubt that 100% of those possible permutations are acceptable in Russian even as “poetic license” rather than incomprehensible word salad
That’s a pretty meat-hegemonic attitude. There’s nothing wrong with salad. At any rate salads are intended to be eaten, not comprehended.
So perhaps I’m overthinking this, since you may just mean “indigestible word salads”. I myself reject word goulash as well, and all kinds of evasively polite text consisting of unsourced suggestions (“generative AI”). Whether fish or fresh.
Not permutations, but rather irreprochable, chinkless plausibility is what you have to be on your guard against. In fact permuting your words may be a good simple way to throw AI harvesters off course.
@Stu: Perhaps the shrinks who originally coined “word salad” as an idiom were carnivores? I don’t know exactly how old it is, but it turns up in Stedman’s 1918 _Practical Medical Dictionary_ as “A term applied by Forel to the jumble of meaningless words uttered by a patient suffering from catatonia.” That’s apparently Auguste-Henri Forel (1848-1931), who apparently used the phrasing “salad de mots.” Wikipedia advises that Forel also studied ants and “sexology,” and was from 1978 to 2000 depicted on high-value Swiss paper money (the 1000-franc note).
@JWB, I already mentioned that ready essays posted by foreign learners for correction was my hobby for a while.
This is not why I registered on that site (it was not language learning either), but when I came I immediately discovered that some errors made by speakers of certain languages are beautiful, some phrases they use are beautiful and correct (they just would not occur to a native speaker) and importantly not only they ask questions, but when you’re thinking why some phrase “sounds unnatural” you learn a lot about your language (“sounds unnatural” normally implies “the problem can’t be explained within school grammar”).
Particularly that night I thought about how Russian word order and intonation interact. Not many linguists published on this topic. And I thought about the table of word order and stress combinations (I did not think about “acceptability”, just whether they are “in use”)
@JWB, yes, Khlebnikov is “weird sequences of sounds”.
But the most brutal way to butcher Russian word order is same as in English: splitting the pair preposition-noun. Particularly in English when this splitting does not have established meaning – English word order somehow manages to “dissolve” links between the two.
And I think a poet can do this if she likes. The question is whether she’s going to like it.
@Brett, apparently he percieves word order differently, and it’s not merely matter of taste:/
In Russian word order is information structure. But in poetry it drifts. I don’t know to what extent it is
– because in poetry the discoursive function of word order (what I’m talking about and what new information I was to convey) can even distract.
– fitting to the metre
– conventions and traditions accumulated in poetry.
It is a meaningful question, to what extent this happens in Greek… and English (where word order also takes on the syntactic function) – and accordingly if plain English is a good idea.
That is, to what extent the dish can be properly cooked without this ingredient.
ah ya zein – forgot to link the original. An Arabic song, as far as I can tell frequent in belly-dancing collections (and apparently there is a version by a French band Alabina which mixes up Arabic with Spanish)
That’s a pretty meat-hegemonic attitude. There’s nothing wrong with salad.
Especially as, at least here in Germany, salad doesn’t have to be vegetarian; as you probably know, there are Fleischsalat & Wurstsalat, and if they are not on the menu, just go for some Kartoffelsalat mit Speck.
I didn’t think of that ! Perhaps it’s salad-as-a-mixture-of chopped-unidentifiable-stuff that is being deprecated, whether green or ruddy grey (Fleischsalat). “Give me meat and potatoes!”
Оливье is a salat.
It contains either докторская (the sausage, not dissertation) whose meat content is unclear* or cooked chicken meat.
salad-as-a-mixture-of unidentifiable-stuff is kasha
*Wish there were a kosher/halal version. Normally if I need to introduce Russian cuisine to someone who does not eat pork it is not a problem: I don’t eat it either:) I just don’t like it**.
** I also think pigs are God’s plan B (nuclear war, etc.) but I’m not sure what is the position of Islam and Judaism on this explanation.
“Meat content unclear” is the definition of sausage 😉
In German, doktorskaya is called Fleischwurst “meat sausage”, which tells you all you need to know 🙂
And God’s plan B can only be the cockroach; unfortunately for the pigs, our porcine friends have as much or as little a chance to survive any human-induced Armageddon as humans…
We have kødpølse which is probably mechanically recovered pork and gristle. Tellingly, the meat content is 66% and only God knows what the rest is.
“The classical kødpølse is characterized by a very smooth structure and consistency which makes it one of the big favorites in a packed lunch.” Yeah, right, I haven’t eaten any for going on 50 years, I think.
“Fleischwurst” – the genere is called варёная колбаса “cooked sausage”. Doktorskaya is the most famous (and somewhat more expensive) sort.
The soviet classification is
варёная “cooked”
варёно-копчёная “cooked smoked” (I hate it)
сырокопчёная “raw smooked”
It does indeed have a very smooth texture, but unlike many sausages it is not fatty and I never found it disgusting. It can be boring.
@lars
Sentences like “The classical kødpølse is characterized by a very smooth structure and consistency which makes it one of the big favorites in a packed lunch.”
suffer from a fatal ambiguity, i.e., whether it is the favorite of the packer or the consumer. I would say, in the absence of any additional information about the consumer, in this case we may safely assume that the packer is intended.
I did know someone who relished a brawn sandwich, however.
Logically the consumer won’t want it to be too smooth and the maker simply won’t care…
The formulation is probably aimed at parents getting ingredients for their kids’ lunchboxes. No actual kids were allowed to express their opinion. The original verbiage was hvilket gør den til en af storfavoritterne i madpakken which in Danish is very hard to construe as anything but a true fact about the actual opinion of the consumers of the resulting open sandwich. (By which I mean that the sentence is written as if it were a true fact. It may be a bald-faced lie, but there is no linguistic difference between a bald-faced lie and a true statement).
If they’d said et af vores favoritprodukter, you would get PP’s ambiguity.
Also, with all my kids now being adults, I can’t get a fact check. But kids these days™ are surprisingly averse to food that is not blended to a smooth goo, like jam with whole fruits. 11yo me preferred actual crunch on my madder.
_____________________
(*) But leverpostej! I hear you object, but there were always slices of fresh cucumber or pickled red beets on those.
“It may be a bald-faced lie, but there is no linguistic difference between a bald-faced lie and a true statement”
Even angels find Danish difficult! (because of this [unique?] property I mean)
I think that’s a universal, sadly. Caveat lector.
And adding evidentials doesn’t help, the bald-faced lie just gets a little more bald-faced if you have to add the evidential for personally witnessed fact.
@Lars: Fleischwurst was and is quite popular with German kids. Part of the reason is that it’s usual at butcher’s shops or meat counters in supermarkets to offer little children accompanying their parents a slice of Fleischwurst for free – get them early!
Aha!
Fleischwurst:
in Deutschland verschiedene Brühwurstsorten, siehe Lyoner
in Österreich eine der beiden Hauptvarianten von Brühwurst, siehe Brühwurst
Brühwurst:
Brühwurst (“scalded sausage” or “parboiled sausage”) is the collective name for several types of sausages according to the German classification.[1] They are a cooked sausage that are scalded[2] (parboiled),[3] as opposed to being raw.
So that’s why варёная, cooked. The left one in the picture is like Russian варёная, and the central one recembles our cooked-smoked sausage, but hopefully is more edible.
I think I must thank LH and Bathrobe for MT. A great toy.
The left one in the picture is like Russian варёная
That’s the one I know as “Fleischwurst “.
This seems like LH fodder: apparently Tolkien translated Jabberwocky into Old English .
The original poems quoted in the Tolkien article are pretty bad. To his credit, he knew better than to publish them.