Nora Ikstena’s “Mātes piens” (Mother’s Milk; published in English as Soviet Milk) is one of the novels in the book series “MĒS. Latvija, XX gadsimts” (We. Latvia. The 20th Century). It describes the difficulties that can arise in the mother-daughter relationship, describes the Soviet time’s environment and its impact on everyday life. The historical novel “Mātes piens” has been published in 25 countries, which means that this novel has been translated into many different cultures, which are less familiar with the mentality of the Latvian people and the USSR times in Latvia. Therefore, it is crucial how the text is translated or whether the style and the particular poetics of Nora Ikstena’s language in this novel are accurately reproduced. Therefore, the scientific research work “Quality of Translated Comparisons of Nora Ikstena’s “Soviet Milk” and “Молоко матери”” was developed. Comparisons requiring the translator to take into account both the content and the meaning of the words were analysed, as well as the aspect of language imagery and culture. The novel was translated into English by Margita Gailīts, and into Russian by Ludmila Nukņeviča.
The events of the novel “Soviet Milk” take place from the end of the Second World War until the 1980s. The main character is a daughter, whose story is intertwined with the life stories of her mother and grandmother. The novel portrays the daughter’s struggle with her mother’s depression, which has deprived her of emotional intimacy with her mother since birth; the daughter continues to hope and gain her mother’s love, helping in times of crisis and ignoring several rejections.
Although the translation process is very old, the question about the translation quality is still relevant. Using sources of information and gaining theoretical knowledge of the translation process, an error estimation method was developed that allows the word “quality” to be quantified.
Literary translation is mostly separated from other translation types and put into a separate category, usually because the meaning of a literary work cannot be clarified in simple terms presented today. It is also difficult to analyse what the reader expects from the translation. Since there cannot be one right way of translating literature, the sense of the translator’s ethical duty to the author is the most important. However, this is very limited by how well the translator understands the author’s intentions and what is said and how much freedom the translator is given to change the text to find the most appropriate way to express the idea in the language. (Sager 1994)
Four groups were divided by Juliane House’s theory (House 2014; House 2017) about overt errors. Text translation errors are divided into 2 categories – covert and overt. Covert errors are difficult to notice because, superficially, from a grammatical point of view, the sentence is correct, but its content is not logical or acceptable. The overt errors detected are obvious, constitute a systematic error. Overt errors are divided into 7 groups: 1 – not translated; 2 – a slight change in meaning; 3 – a significant change in meaning; 4 – distortion of meaning; 5 – breach of SL system; 6 – creative translation; 7 – cultural filtering.
64 comparisons in Latvian, 64 equivalents in Russian, and 55 equivalents in English were excerpted (9 comparisons were not translated). Translations of comparisons were divided into 4 groups: 1) accurately translated, 2) translations with minor changes, 3) culturally harmonized translations, 4) untranslated comparisons. Translations of comparisons that scored 5 points or more are considered qualitatively translated, given that there are no significant errors.
There is no single fundamental criterion for the quality of a translation against which all translated texts can be judged. There are several definitions of quality translation, and quality is affected by many factors. The translations of comparisons in both foreign languages (English and Russian) are of high quality; they received high marks if they were analysed according to the error evaluation table because the maximum number of points that could be obtained was 6 points and no comparative translation was lower than 5 points. The Russian translation is more successful (comparative translations more often scored 6 points) than the English translation, which can be justified by the fact that the Russian language is historically and geographically a neighbor of the Latvian language, but the English language and culture are remote. Phraseological comparisons are translated literally and also more accurately into Russian; there are more of the same equivalents in the target culture. When evaluating comparisons that use the concepts of biblical story motifs or images of Greek mythology, they are mostly accurately translated into the target languages, as the target cultures are well acquainted with this religion and Greek mythology. One of the most important findings – not only literal translations are of high quality; it is much more important to express them in a way that is understandable to the target culture while maintaining the author’s writing style and the text’s main idea, paying attention to details.
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