Steiner and Bellos

 I feel Steiner’s style of writing is beautiful. He used a lot of words that were accurate but also exaggerated/creative. He mentioned that “the import, of meaning and of form, the embodiment, is not made in or into a vacuum” and stated the importance of incorporative in translation. Translators not only translate meanings but also put their interpretation into the texts. As Steiner said, “translator——interpreter creates a condition of significant exchange. ” Bellos made a similar statement as well and emphasized more on how phonology could play its roles in translation. It’s very intriguing when Bellos mentioned: “In fact, the most obvious way to make a text sound foreign is to leave parts of it in the original.” I could feel it so much when I read translated books(especially the ones translated from Russian to Chinese). Bellos also pointed out another possibility that because readers did not know the original language of the book, they would assume that the author’s voice of writing sounded foreign. Like the Kafka example that he analyzed: “In German, Kafka doesn’t sound ‘German’ at all—he sounds like Kafka…Making Kafka sound German in English is perhaps the best means a translator has to communicate to the reader his or her own experience of reading the original.” As a translator, it’s hard to manipulate the voice of the author. Kafka sounds like Kafka in German, but translator could make the choice to let him sound like a German, or a native English speaker, or the Kafka who speaks through the translator. 

NIna