English meets Czech II

This is a continuation of a previous post, where I described some of the challenges I met when trying to translate the first two chapters of The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune into Czech. If you didn’t read it yet, it can be found here.

Out of style

Some things are always in style, like “the red lip classic thing that you like”. And style is important in language too. Czech is among other big on different levels of politeness. That reflects in individual word choices and also in pronouns and verb forms, with the latter being called the polite-you form. (It’s easier to show with pronouns. Referring to your friend, you use ty, whereas talking to your teacher or the cashier at Lidl, you use vy – both of these translates as ‘you’.)

So while English does not (grammatically) distinguish these two levels, it seemed natural for Linus to use the polite form with his boss, the bus driver, or his older neighbor but not, e.g., Calliope, his cat. (Not the best example, but there are no other friendly faces in the first two chapters!) It wasn’t exactly clear to me, which form he should use with Mr. Tremblay, his co-worker, but given their not-very-friendly status, I chose to go for the polite, less friendly forms.

I enjoyed playing with Linus’ speech style, depending on the degree of formality of whichever context he finds himself in. When he talks to people at work, he’s rather formal, going for words like děkuji. A simple choice of the -i ending makes it higher-style, compared to the more casual děkuju with -u at the end. Then, when he’s alone, safe at home, he slips into a more casual style (again note the -u at the end of nepotřebuju (‘I don’t need’)):

“Nepotřebuju žádného účetního,” řekl Calliope, která se mu proplétala mezi nohama

“I don’t need an accountant,” he told Calliope as she wound between his legs.

When he’s extra nervous around the upset Ms. Jenkins, I made him speak even more careful, choosing a particularly high-style mohu instead of a more normal můžu:

“What can I do for you?”

“Co pro vás mohu udělat?”

There were more difficult choices to make, though. I got particularly stuck on the forms of the passive:

He knew they were monitored constantly.

There are two ways to translate it to Czech – in the sentences below, focus on the length difference on the verb:

Věděl, že jsou neustále monitorovaní.

Věděl, že jsou neustále monitorováni.

The first sentence has a short a and long í, the second a long á and short i. The first sentence is something I would say naturally. The second is the more “correct” usage pushed by schools and used in books. In my opinion, it sounds somewhat old or even pretentious. I would certainly not let a character talk like that in direct speech, but what about outside of it? Where the voice is (usually) supposed to be more or less neutral?

I tried to research how other translators deal with it. One of my favorite translators was Jan Kantůrek, who translated all of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld into Czech. I’ve rarely seen a translation as natural as his (including using different dialects where fit, like translating the Scottish accent into the heavy Moravian one for the Nac Mac Feegle).

Well, he uses both forms, seemingly interchangeably.

In the end, I went for both, too, relying on both the statistics data of one form over the other and my own native-speaker intuition but always trying to go for the most natural one:

The walls were lined with terrible paintings of lemurs in various poses.

Stěny byly lemované/lemovány příšernými obrazy lemurů v nejrůznějších pozicích. (modern form)

He wasn’t meant to be seen.

Nebylo mu souzené/souzeno být viděn. (older form)

Finally, there were also particular word choices that I kept despite them being very this-is-a-book-and-not-normal-speech, like using “madam” for addressing someone. Technically speaking, you can keep it the same, madam. Everyone will understand. Books often keep it like this. Would anyone in a real-life situation use it? I doubt it.

The thing is that the only other way to translate it that comes to my mind is with paní, but that’s more like “Mrs”. Potkala jsem paní tu a tu (‘I met Mrs this and that’) is fine. Calling someone paní in the middle of a conversation sounds unnatural and almost rude to me (just as, I assume, using “Mrs” in that same context would be, though I’m not sure).

I kept madam because the only other option I saw was to just leave the address out altogether:

“I would appreciate, madam, if I could hear from Daisy herself.”

„Madam, ocenil bych, kdyby mi odpověděla Daisy sama.”

Czech meets… statistics?

Thanks to being a linguist and knowing different resources for studying the language from different angles, I knew exactly where to look when I had two (or more) variants in mind.

Czech has this odd thing where two different forms of a word (usually a noun) exist without any apparent difference in style. And so, when Linus’ “pen continued to scratch along the paper”, I found myself wondering whether to translate it as po papíře or po papíru. Both forms are possible, both sound alright in precisely the same context, and I don’t see any particular difference between them.

Checking the corpus, it turns out that papíru is more common than papíře but once you add the preposition, it turns around – po papíře is more common than po papíru (at least in the written Czech). Wild stuff.

The brown box kind of day

One thing I’m still not sure how I feel about is translating cultural references.

Imagine a Czech (fiction) book that uses a comparison like: “He was a bit of a Jára Cimrman”. It’s a reference that most Czech people will get, and in a Czech text, it makes total sense. But in the English translation? How many people will get a heavily cultural reference that is not part of the English-speaking world?

And now the question is – does one leave it there as a little way to teach about different cultures? Or do you keep the focus on trying to get the message across and try to translate it? But translate it how? Jára Cimrman is a fictional polymath with a somewhat goofy personality and genius street-smarts (not entirely dissimilar to Terry Pratchett’s Leonard of Quirm, minus the street-smarts). I’ve heard Jára Cimrman being compared to Chuck Norriss, but that completely misses up on the character’s personality. He could be referred to as Jack-of-All-Trades or likened to the Rennaisance polymaths, but… I don’t know. It loses something.

Then, there are even more subtle cultural references. In The House, Linus is having a long conversation in his head, trying to figure out why his supervisor is upset with him. He panics and assumes he will be sacked. The text says:

He wouldn’t need a brown box.

I have to admit, I don’t have enough experience with being fired, so I might be wrong about this. Still, the image of a person packing their belongings into a brown box is probably not the Czech experience. And I’m not aware of there being anything else in its place, any particular “Czech sacking procedure”.

In the end, I chose to translate it rather literally, saying he will not need even a box:

Na svoje věci nebude potřebovat ani krabici.

It no longer refers to a custom of any sort but still conveys the meaning of what an impersonal place his office is.

I’ve dealt with a similar issue when translating the sentence below:

It looked as if it were all advertisements addressed impersonally to RESIDENT.

The word rezident exists in Czech with the same meaning but is not commonly used in impersonal advertisement post. It took me a while to figure out if there was anything similar in the Czech experience. I arrived at:

Vypadalo to na samé letáky neosobně adresované VÁŽENÉMU PÁNOVI/VÁŽENÉ PANÍ.

Literally, they are addressed to Dear Sir/Dear Madam. A nice thing about it is that it truly captures the impersonality with the double-gender reference, making it a rather funny thing to read in Czech (at least for me).

There was, of course, more of similar stuff. Who would have guessed there does not seem to be any good translation for “frizzy hair”? It’s fascinating since I know exactly what it means, and yet, there are no Czech words for it…? Even weirder is that all the dictionaries gave me translations like “kudrnatý” or “kadeřavý” – but no, people, that means “curly” or “wavy”, which is not the same as frizzy at all!

What is in a name?

I spent a good amount of time figuring out how to translate DICOMY (the Department in Charge of Magical Youth).

I wanted the abbreviation to have vowels because it pronounces better. DICOMY. daɪkɒmi. Feels like a real word without having to resort to spelling it out letter by letter. It comes in handy when your language has vowel-initial prepositions like in and of. Unfortunately for me, Czech loves consonant-initial prepositions, like v (‘in’), nad (‘over, of, for’) or z (‘from’). The few that are vowel-initial, like o (‘about’), od (‘from’) or u (‘by’), don’t seem to fit the context very well.

In the end, I went for ODKD (Oddělení dohledu nad kouzelnou mládeží, a loose translation is ’the Department Overseeing the Magical Youth’). The vowels get there (only) by spelling it out, ɔːdɛːkɑːdɛː. Not what I hoped for, but it does resemble actual Czech abbreviations of departments, so at least something.

A finishing thought

There were plenty of little catches and challenges like the above. These are really just the ones I can remember on the spot. It’s been a fun little exercise I enjoyed with my whole heart. I love language. I love thinking about how to express things the best, and having to ponder how things are really said made me think about things I wouldn’t otherwise.

Going through the text slowly also made me (as someone who also writes fiction) appreciate the book even more on the creative side. One particular thing I didn’t notice before is how the atmosphere changes when Linus comes home from work.

See, the first few chapters take place in the city where it always rains, and people are not particularly friendly. It has an overload of passive-aggressive comments, suspicion, and whatnot, not offering an enjoyable atmosphere (which is then contrasted with when he arrives at the orphanage on the island, far from the city). I was always noticing that contrast – the city vs. the island. But now, I also noticed that the atmosphere softens when Linus returns home from work in the evening. Consider the excerpt below:

He stepped off the bus (which had, of course, been ten minutes late) at the stop a few blocks from his house.

“It’s a wet one out there,” the driver told him.

“A fine observation,” Linus replied as he stepped onto the sidewalk. “Really. Thank you for—” The doors snapped shut behind him, and the bus pulled away. The back right tire hit a rather large puddle, splashing up and soaking Linus’s slacks up to his knees. Linus sighed and began to trudge his way home.

Not the nicest of pictures. But from there, it continues:

The neighborhood was quiet, the streetlamps lit and inviting, even in the cold rain. The houses were small, but the street was lined with trees covered in leaves that were beginning to change colors, the dull green fading to an even duller red and gold. There were rosebushes at 167 Lakewood that bloomed quietly. There was a dog at 193 Lakewood that yipped excitedly whenever it saw him. And 207 Lakewood had a tire swing hanging from a tree, but the children who lived there apparently thought they were far too old to use it anymore. Linus had never had a tire swing before. He’d always wanted one, but his mother had said it was far too dangerous.

There’s still some melancholy, some hints that things are not completely warm and lovely, like in the tire swing or the mother comment. Still, the language is in dire contrast with the previous passages. Things are “quiet”, “lit and inviting”, “small”, “colorful”, “blooming” and just… homey.

I found it to be written so skillfully and beautifully, and when I read it now, I sigh in relief as if I was home too.