English meets Czech I

In the previous posts (1 and 2), I talked about wanting to translate The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune into Czech. In those posts, I described how it all started and my very first translation puzzle, exclamations like “oh dear”.

In this and the next post, I will go through several other domains in which I was challenged by the original text when trying to translate it into Czech.

Since I don’t know yet if anyone’s willing to hire me – heck, I don’t even know if translation rights for Czech are (still?) available – I decided that for the beginning, I will translate only the first two chapters, which I will then offer to different publishing houses that might be interested. But for those two chapters, I’ll give them what a friend of mine calls a “Rolls-Royce treatment” to really show off my skills.

I went through the text six times. These are what the individual passes were focused on:

• first pass, translating the best I can without getting stuck on challenging things in a kind of a first-draft manner
• second pass, going through all the things I wasn’t happy with on my first pass
• third pass, carefully checking that I didn’t miss any sentence; so glad I heard this tip somewhere because I would not think of it, especially since I consider myself a very detail-oriented person; well, I missed three sentences!
• fourth pass, (quietly) rereading my text without referencing the original to check that it sounds natural in Czech
• fifth pass, color-marking all the utterances and checking that each character’s speaking style is both unique and consistent
• sixth pass, rereading the whole text out loud to again check that it all sounds natural

As you can see, many of the steps are directed toward checking that the reader will (hopefully) not even realize they are reading a translation. It is extra important to me because I have recently read two young adult books translated into Czech (one from English, one from French), and I could barely get through them because of the language alone. It did not feel natural at all. So my intent was to ruthlessly get rid of anything stilted, any unnecessary diminutives and childish exclamations plaguing the other translations.

What were some of the things I ran into?

My brow or yours?

English uses so much more possessive pronouns!

Let’s come back to the very first sentence of the book, which is absolutely perfect for showing several translation challenges in such a small space:

“Oh dear,” Linus Baker said, wiping the sweat from his brow.

For whatever reason, Czech will not have “his” there. You can’t say: …zatímco si utíral pot ze svého čela. It feels so odd I’m almost uncomfortable and want to ask from whose else’s brow he would typically be wiping the sweat?¹

So in many places, I just needed to drop the plethora of possessives in English.

Although…

Daisy frowned in concentration, the tip of her tongue stuck out between her teeth.

… a špička jejího jazyka (jí) vyčuhovala mezi jejími zuby? On one hand, again, whose else’s?? Sounds so odd in Czech.

At the same, the translation I arrived at is … a špička jazyka jí vyčuhovala mezi zuby, where jí refers back to Daisy. Not as a possessive, but it’s still a pronoun specifying to whom the action refers, and the sentence would not transfer the correct meaning without it.

Despite Czech being my native language, something about the possessives being there in the original always made me want to put them in the translation too. Hence all the passes to make sure that my translation works in Czech, and I’m not just being a somewhat fancier, more coffee-driven Google Translate.

The long and the short of it

If you asked me before I started, I would be confident that Czech would be the language where longer sentences sound more natural.

I think my assumption would have been based on the fact that written Czech is heavily shepherded by schools and academia, which is something I associate with longer, more clunky sentences. The language change is reflected slowly, making some native speakers believe they don’t speak Czech, when, in fact, they just don’t know all the complicated rules that are supposed to constitute “proper Czech”.

Written English has always seemed to me closer to how people actually speak. And that’s to the point where Neil Gaiman can write a whole book in a dialect, and no one seems to bat an eye. (Or did I miss something? I mostly only found this helpful Reddit thread, except that it’s focused on the TV show and not the book.) Then again, I would probably be less surprised if I read Anansi Boys before my translation. Some sentences are loooong.

Here’s an example from The House (still uncomparably short to Neil’s sentences):

Her assistant, a despicable toad of a man named Gunther, followed close behind her, carrying a clipboard and an obscenely long pencil he used to keep tally of those who appeared to be slacking on the job.

Closest to the original would probably be to say:

Její asistent, opovrženíhodná mužská ropucha jménem Gunther, byl hned za ní a nesl si psací podložku s obscéně dlouhou tužkou, kterou si zapisoval ty, u nichž se zdálo, že se ulejvají z práce.

Somehow, it doesn’t sound that good to my ear. It feels too long, and, as a reader, I’m getting lost in it, trying to track all the right meanings and connections.

Splitting it into two sentences brings about a sigh of relief on my side:

Její asistent, opovrženíhodná mužská ropucha jménem Gunther, byl hned za ní a nesl si psací podložku s obscéně dlouhou tužkou. Používal ji k zápisu těch, u nichž se zdálo, že se ulejvají z práce.

I currently think that a big chunk of the issue is not the length per se but the continuous form. There is no short, natural translation for carrying and slacking. Czech has a form called přechodník (transgressive), which is something like the continuous tense, but it feels rather artificial in modern Czech. It’s one of those language phenomena we need to learn at school to use correctly, which, for me, means it’s not part of the natural language anymore.

So whenever there was a verb in the continuous form, I needed to find a way around it, which often meant cutting the sentence in two. Below, see another sentence with a continuous form that I first translate with a transgressive and then split into two sentences, using jak (‘as, while’) to depict that the event is progressing:

He nervously pulled on the collar of his shirt as Ms. Jenkins approached, weaving her way between the desks, her heels snapping against the cold, stone floor.

Nervózně si zatahal za límeček košile, zatímco se paní Jenkinsová blížila, proplétaje se mezi stoly, její podpatky klapaly na studené, kamenné podlaze.

Nervózně si zatahal za límeček košile, zatímco se paní Jenkinsová blížila. Jak se proplétala mezi stoly, její podpatky klapaly na studené, kamenné podlaze.

My intuition that it’s about the continuous form and not about the length of the sentence seems to be confirmed by some much longer sentences in the book that work as good in Czech as they do in English:

The only time he’d actually seen Extremely Upper Management was during the holidays when the luncheon occurred, and Extremely Upper Management stood in a row at the front of the room, dishing out dried-up ham and lumpy potatoes from foil trays, grinning at each of their underlings, telling them they’d earned this fine meal for all their hard work.

Jedinkrát, kdy Extrémně Vyšší Vedení viděl, bylo o svátcích, když měli slavnostní oběd a Extrémně Vyšší Vedení stálo v jedné řadě v přední části místnosti, kde z hliníkových táců nabírali vyschlou šunku a hrudkovité šťouchané brambory, zubili se na každého ze svých podřízených a říkali jim, že si to skvělé jídlo zasloužili vší svojí tvrdou dřinou.

Yum! And also, while there is all the dishing, grinning, and telling, the place reference “at the front of the row” makes it easy to continue it with kde (‘where’) in Czech. That makes it easy to use the simple past tense, so the issue of the -ing form doesn’t arise.

(Since the post was too long, I decided to split it in two. You can continue reading here.)