Is Transcribing Translating? You decide – Day 7

For the final day of reading in translation, I thought I'd try a completely different twist and consider if transcribing is translating?

I'm going to say yes, because I took a course on editing in grad school and we definitely had to transcribe and often translate as well as identify and define terms. I guess that fits within the definition of translation.

To that end, I read a few modern books with a twist of translation, focusing on transcription of what’s heard rather than written. They are all mysteries and thrillers which are one of my favorite genre.

Kate Atkinson – Transcription" features a WWII era spy for MI5 who listens in on British Fascist sympathizers. When she finds the spy ring is still active in the 1950s, she's bound and determined to take action. Here she's translating her skills learned as a spy to those as a civilian. What a twist! 

Hannah Morrissey's "Hello, Transcriber"pushes the envelope of my definition of translation. The flyleaf blurb describes the book as "a captivating mystery suspense debut featuring a female police transcriber who goes beyond the limits to solve a harrowing case."

Finally, I must ask the question "Do the Robert Langdon books by Dan Brown, including “The Da Vinci Code” count?" After all, Langdon must translate signs and symbols in this book and several others. Once he translates the clues, he must solve the crime and find the bomb or secret cult. 

 

Thanks for following me as I read in translation this week. I'll be back in August with a new series of posts about books.

Books about translating – Day 6

As a student of the classics and ancient history, I had to translate lots of bits of books from the Greek or Latin. As an historian, I became interested in the archaeologists, classicists, and historians who took on the difficult task of translating inscriptions on buildings and in archaeological finds.

One of the early important manuscripts translated was "The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum" discovered by E. A. Wallis Budge in 1888. He took on the task of translating hieroglyphics. 

You can read a contemporary book about this topic in "The Book of Two Ways" published in 2020 by  Jody Picoult where the main character was an archaeology student who was fascinated by Egyptian culture.

 

 

There are several books on translating Egyptian hieroglyphs including the newest book on the topic "The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone" by Edward Dolnick. I just love reading about the Rosetta Stone. It is the key to understanding hieroglyphics. The trilingual stone was inscribed in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek.

 

An older book on the topic is "The Linguist and the Emperor: Napoleon and Champollion's Quest to Decipher the Rosetta Stone" by Daniel Meyerson. 

 

             

As a student who studied Greek, I became fascinated by proto-Greek defined as Linear B, and the indecipherable, earlier language, Linear A. These tablets were discovered in mainland Greece by Heinrich Schliemann and on Crete by Sir Arthur Evans. 

While Michael Ventris is given credit for translating the symbols, the work was begun and the symbols cracked by Alice Kober as described in "Riddle of the Labyrinth:The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code" by Margalit Fox. Kober was a talented linguist who determined that the symbols were a combination of sounds and symbols. Sadly, she died before was recognized for her translating achievement.

One of my favorite archaeological finds are the winged creatures and the five legged bulls found at Nineveh. Austen Henry Layard found these monumental architectural sculptures as he excavated the city.

He wrote about his discoveries in"Nineveh and Its Remains." 

  The sculptures are covered with bands of cuneiform, seen to the left. The other archaeologist who wrote about finding monumental cuneiform inscriptions was Sir Henry Rawlinson.

 

My favorite book about languages that are seeking translation is "Forgotten Scripts: Their Ongoing Discovery and Decipherment" by Cyrus H. Gordon. 

No matter what language, there's always a need to translate it into another. The older the language, the fewer specialists. In the best cases, historians or archaeologists find bilingual or tri-lingual texts as with the Rosetta stone. As readers, we are the beneficiaries of the gift of language of talented translators.

 

Stay tuned to the last day of my journey, "Reading in Translation," posted tomorrow!