![]() By the quote, the author does not tell whether the boy missing the bus was necessarily negative. If a translator were to write “unfortunately, the boy had missed the bus by only two minutes”, the words “unfortunately” and “only” would add a bias to the story. The quote “il ragazzo ha perso l’autobus per due minuti” means “the boy missed the bus by two minutes”. ![]() Finding the meaning can be difficult in certain books or poems, but using context in deciphering meanings is key.Īdding bias to translation also sways away from the author’s original intentions. For example, it is agreed upon that in Hamlet’s soliloquy “To be or not to be” is referencing whether he should live or die. The meaning of the text can be found through a majority agreement, meaning what the accepted interpretation and connotation is. The goal should be to keep the translation as close to the source text as possible while conveying the message it was meant to. By adding this ‘extra layer’, the translator adds what was not originally there, which is not the desired outcome. By there being an added extra level interpretation or meaning that was not there originally, means that the translator has added more to the story. In a dramatic example, if the sentence is “lei ha un panino in forno”, meaning that there is bread cooking in the oven, and is translated to “she has a bun in the oven”, it does not only that she is baking something in the kitchen, but that expression is also a common light-hearted way to say that a woman is pregnant. When a translation is too loose where the meaning can be interpreted other ways that would not be found in the source language, then there is a major lack of faithfulness. A translation becomes unfaithful when the translator loses the spirit of the source text in the target language. The “spirit” of a text is the original meaning the author is trying to convey. In his quote, in the book Experiences in Translation, Eco is posing the question of how communicative a translation can possibly be until it loses its faithfulness to the original text. This is a quote by the famous Italian writer Umberto Eco, famous for works such as The Name of the Rose and other novels/essays. “To what extent can a translation be referentially ‘unfaithful’?” (p.30).
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