Comments on Hibbett Reading

    The first aspect that stands out to me when Hibbett begins is that he spends a good amount of time talking about the author whose work he translates. He goes into depth about Tanizaki’s history and experiences, but what interested me the most was the criticism directed at the author. According to the speech, critics described Tanizaki as a “storyteller” and Hibbett notes this as a disadvantage. He acknowledges this as unexpected, but it still surprised me that a usually praise-worthy trait for an author could be seen as negative. In addition, Hibbett talks about Tanizaki’s controversial history of “aestheticizing” Japan. This was one of the few times I’ve seen a translator criticize the person they’re translating.

    Something that I agreed with Hibbett on was avoiding footnoting in nonscholarly works. With these kinds of works, it’s easier to replace words or phrases with something the target audience would understand better. However, with scholarly article and other more professional works, it’s sometimes impossible, and even detrimental to the meaning of the original work, to substitute words in.

    

    Hibbett also talks about retranslating works. Personally, I don’t think it’s wise to, and believe it’s best to translate from the original whenever possible. Hibbett already cites errors that translators, including himself, have made during their work. These errors, when translated across more and more languages, can easily be accentuated and completely warp the original meaning of the text. It’s interesting to see it being acknowledged though; it goes to show that the decisions that translators make affect not only how their audience sees their translations, but the original works themselves.

 

Alex