A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi: Translating Multilingual Texts
A New York intellectual sprinkles her sentences with French and German. A Chicago gangster insults his enemies in Italian. A cowboy switches deftly in and out of Spanish. Poland is no different. But what do you do when these real-life situations appear in literature? Sean Bye shares his experiences, tricks and tips on translating multilingual texts.
We’ve all seen tropes like these in American movies and books. All over the world, even in mostly monolingual countries, languages are constantly mixed – whether for flavour or out of necessity.
Poland is no different. Lying at the heart of Europe, its history of ethnic diversity, emigration and shifting borders have at times made for a rich culture of multilingualism. As a translator, I often see this reflected in Polish literature. For instance, in The House with the Stained-Glass Window, Żanna Słoniowska interweaves Ukrainian into her Polish. In On the Road to Babadag by Andrzej Stasiuk, travelling traders communicate in a kind of pan-Slavic jargon. Filip Springer’s History of a Disappearance talks about the process of creating Polish names for the formerly German towns of Western Poland after World War II.
This kind of multilingualism can create particular challenges for a translator – something I experienced firsthand when translating The King of Warsaw by Szczepan Twardoch. Twardoch’s novel tells the story of Jewish gangsters in Warsaw in the late 1930s, a time when the capital had a large Yiddish-speaking population. The characters not only slip in and out of Yiddish, but also add in dashes of Hebrew, Russian, German and even English. This multilingualism helped Twardoch vividly recreate the cosmopolitan atmosphere of pre-war Warsaw. But for me, it posed the question of how to convey that to readers outside Poland.
So when you’re translating a text from Polish into English, what do you do with material that… isn’t in Polish?
What message is the author trying to send their readers?
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Irena, Krystyna & Karolina Buniakowska in Warsaw's Market Square, photo taken by Bronisław Bunikowski, Warszawa,1936, photo: from the family archive of Leszek Kasprzak / Forum
As a translator I always try to focus on two things: the author’s intention and the effect on the reader. What message is the author trying to send, and how is the reader interpreting it? For instance, if a character mixes their Polish with German, does that mean he was an immigrant? Or were they educated abroad? Maybe they comes from a mixed ethnic background? If the author doesn’t give explicit information, what can the reader infer?
Another question is how much of the foreign language the reader can understand – for instance, a Polish writer might have a Czech or Ukrainian character using simple words or phrases in their native language, trusting that readers in Poland could at least somewhat understand these closely related Slavic languages.
Figuring out the author’s intention and the reader’s likely interpretation is half the battle. Yet, as always with translation, the message may not stay the same when the text moves from one culture to another. For instance, Twardoch’s gangsters speak street Yiddish, showing their rough, working-class backgrounds and also their non-assimilation into Polish society. But in the United States, Yiddish is often associated with humour, thanks to generations of well-known Jewish comedians – could I trust that my readers would see what Twardoch was trying to convey?
For a translator, all these calculations mean that sometimes you have to adapt or make changes, to make sure the effect is the same for your new readers. But before you start adapting, there’s one thing you have to make sure of…
What does it actually mean?
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A flyer for a meeting about the birth of Yiddish, in both Polish & Yiddish, Jewish Touring Society in Łódź, 1939, photo: National Library / Polona
When authors include a second language in a text, usually they want their readers to understand at least some of it. They may pick simple words or phrases that are easy to figure out, or explain the meaning in the text, or provide a footnote. Yet there are exceptions – sometimes they want a phrase to be mysterious, or for their readers to look up a word on their own. One way or the other, it’s essential for a translator to double-check that you understand correctly.
I have friends and colleagues who translate from a lot of languages, and luckily they’ve always been happy to help. For The King of Warsaw, I tapped my friend Sebastian Schulman, who translates from Yiddish. Seb not only helped me understand the Yiddish, he explained to me that the characters were speaking in strong Warsaw dialect, and helped me develop a way showing that non-standard language using English-style spelling.
I also spend a lot of time thinking about how to convey meaning to my readers. In The King of Warsaw, the Yiddish dialogue was translated in footnotes, so I did the same in my translation. But when it came to the gangsters’ interjections in Russian, or Polish muddled up with German, or Hebrew words for Jewish subject matter, sometimes Twardoch supplied explanations and sometimes not. I had to think hard about whether this would have the same effect for English-language readers, and if not, what I should do about it.
What’s the message for your readers in English?
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Aleksander Jałosiński at the Hipoteka Warszawska Archive, Warsaw, September 1982, photo: Aleksander Jałosiński / FORUM / Dom Spotkań z Historią
Let’s take a simple example: in one scene, a character thanks a gangster for carrying out a ‘hit’ for her. The gangster replies: nye za chto, Russian for ‘you’re welcome’.
What does the Polish reader see? First of all, nye za chto is also close to the Polish phrase nie ma za co, which also means ‘you’re welcome’ (or, translated more literally, ‘there’s nothing [to thank me] for’) – so even if the reader doesn’t know Russian, the phrase is easy to figure out. A Polish reader would also know that this character was born before Polish independence, when Warsaw was under Russian rule – so he, like others of his generation, would be used to speaking Russian. Even if they don’t know that, this offhand response provides flavour rather than essential content, so if they miss it, it’s not a big deal.
An English-language reader is less likely to know either the historical context behind using Russian, or to recognise the Russian phrase. In fact, they may not realise it’s Russian at all! So what can a translator do about that?
Firstly, we could put it in English – have him say ‘you’re welcome’, or maybe ‘no problem’. This would be understandable but maybe lose some of the flavor – the reader might miss that Warsaw in this period was a multilingual place, or that this character was comfortable speaking multiple languages.
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At the summer house of the translator Zbigniew Batko, Anielin, photo: Tomasz Stańczak / AG
Secondly, we could leave it in Russian, but add an explanation. Maybe something like this: ‘“Nye za chto”, he said in Russian, telling her it wasn’t a problem’. This seems a little clunky here, especially for an offhand remark, but I often use techniques like this in other circumstances when the reader needs a bit of help. Another method would be to footnote it, but I generally avoid using footnotes if possible. I feel they pull the reader out of the story, and it’s too tempting to overuse them or overload your reader with information.
As a third option, we could substitute another language that an Anglophone reader might be more familiar with. This is tricky, though, because different languages have different connotations. For instance, if the gangster said je vous en prie in French, it might lend an air of sophistication, maybe elegance, that isn’t there in the original. I considered de nada, a Spanish phrase that’s widely known and used in the United States. Yet while any American might have picked up a Spanish phrase casually, it seemed less natural for a gangster 1930s Warsaw. A reader might wonder if the character had lived in Spain or Latin America, or maybe fought in the Spanish Civil War. I thought this would take us too far from the author’s intentions. So while I sometimes find substitution useful, in this case it didn’t seem right.
Lastly, we could just leave nye za chto as-is and let the reader draw whatever conclusions they may. This is a bit risky, because readers might misinterpret – yet it has the advantage of readers in Polish and English working with the same information, even if they draw different conclusions. In the end, this is the approach I took. I thought it was truer to the character and the setting, and that since it was an offhand remark, it was OK if a reader didn’t completely understand it.
Some particular issues
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Akademicka Street in Lviv, 1925-1939, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl / NAC
Multilingualism sometimes poses unsolvable problems. Regional dialects, for instance, are an absolute minefield, because it’s rarely possible to reproduce the same set of cultural connotations without adding new ones that obscure the message. Since dialect is tied to geographic locations, it can also just sound jarring: ‘Why does this Polish farmer sound like he’s from Kentucky?’.
Names are another difficulty. It’s common in Eastern Europe for cities to have multiple names in different languages – so, for instance, while a Polish writer can always talk about Lwów, their translator has to choose between Lviv (Ukrainian), Lvov (Russian), Lwów (Polish) and Lemberg (German and Yiddish), depending on the historical and cultural context. This can extend to people too – take, for instance, the famous World War II-era underground Jewish activist known, depending on who you ask, as Rachel Auerbach, Rachela Auerbach or Rokhl Oyerbakh. In Polish she would generally be known by her ‘Polish’ name (Rachela), but in English, the choice isn’t so obvious. What makes cases like this harder is that there’s no ‘neutral’ choice for a translator – any option you pick will have specific connotations, and can sometimes be politically charged.
So what do you do?
I often joke that the answer to every translation question is ‘it depends’. As unsatisfying as that is, it’s also the answer when it comes to multilingualism in a text. While I’ve laid out some options above, your solution needs to be tailored to the needs of your text, your author and your audience. A solution that works in one book may not work in another. It’s also essential to check your work. Collaboration with colleagues or other experts is key. In my experience, authors are also often willing to help.
When it comes to tricky problems like this, the best I can do as a translator is to do my research, make sure I’m well-informed, and then make a judgment call. And above all, be creative! Tough problems like these sometimes offer the opportunity for imaginative solutions, and that’s part of what makes translation fun.
Written by Sean Gasper Bye, Dec 2020
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