Hibbet and Nathan

 Between the two readings, both offered very interesting views on translation, particularly on the translation of one or a few authors, Nathan of course touching more on the theoretical, referencing quite a few popular theories in the field of translation studies. The viewpoint he has on Kenzaburo Oe's writing as being a language of his own making, and relating it to a song is also a very interesting take in comparison to a landscape of literature that is all largely prescriptive in manner. His statement that the voice of the author drops in relation to the invisibility of the translator is also an incredibly interesting take on the matter, however I digress. Retranslation as mentioned in the prescribed reading questions is something I think most of us in the workshop are familiar with, as I'm sure there are many present who have some form of root in fansubbing or scanlation, and given the amount of content that particular community outputs, retranslation is something that I'm sure most of us have encountered. Having followed the community for a pretty substantial amount of time, perhaps one of the biggest issues in retranslating is minor adjustments made for domestication purposes, be they voluntary or involuntary, and these more often than not go unnoticed by the re-translator, who is typically only capable of understanding the language of the translation to begin with. 

Hibbit's reading on the other hand was very personally interesting, having spent two weeks going over Tanizaki's Kagi myself. While Hibbet does in fact lobby criticisms towards Tanizaki and others, I unfortunately can't say that I've read enough of him to have an educated opinion on the matter. Criticizing the author however I can't say is quite as rare, particularly from my biased point of view as a more commercial translator. I criticize an author or a creator at least twice a week. As a matter of fact I just got finished being upset about an author a few hours ago. I do however very much agree with the assessment that Tanizaki is a storyteller, at least from what little I have read from him in Kagi, and it does present many questions about how best to translate the text. Like many other texts, lines can be very long and stretch what is possible in English without being unreadable word soup, and the format of consisting of two separate diary entries, written in different types, adds even more difficult questions. On a much lighter note however, it is very interesting to hear that he likes to write a lot about feet, and in hindsight that makes a lot of sense. 

Steven