By Chong Bretillon
I’ve always thought being multilingual is a tremendous advantage for instructors, especially in the multicultural environment at the Baruch Writing Center.
I had the opportunity to draw on my second language proficiency in a fun session with one of my “regulars,” a delightful woman and native Spanish speaker who I’ll call “LR.” Her particular assignment intrigued me—it was for a Spanish translation class, and she was to translate a modern prose poem into English. It’s rare that students bring in translations to us at the Writing Center (perhaps because they might assume we’d need knowledge of both languages to help them). LR wanted to evaluate whether her translation sounded colloquial. My goals in this session with LR were thus not to assess the “correctness” of the translation, but to help the student delve into the relationship between Spanish and English—grammar, idiom, and meaning.
Walter Benjamin, distinguished translator of Baudelaire and Proust, writes that translation “serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages” (255). He continues, “Languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express” (255). This session in particular brought the practice of translation to the fore, and I found it immensely helpful for me to grow as an instructor.
After scanning both the poem and her translation, I thought that we could focus on the past tense. Expressing the past tense in Spanish is complex: there are two ways to say “to be,” and the imperfect is expressed as a compound tense, whereas in English it can be expressed with just one verb. My knowledge of Spanish allowed me to see that these differences could cause problems in translation. We then indeed found places where she had used the present progressive “he was walking” instead of the imperfect “he walked.” I asked the student to describe the context of all this walking going on in the poem—and in fact, the present progressive didn’t make sense. Next, we fine-tuned the translation with a mind to respect the “flavor” of the original poem. I asked LR what emotions and mood the poet might be expressing in one section. Trepidation? Fear? Pointing out the short, staccato rhythm of the Spanish in one part, I asked LR how this might be expressed in English translation. Finally, I then turned over the Spanish text and LR read the English poem out loud. Does it stand on its own? she asked. LR worked in her usual meticulous way to ensure that her finished product didn’t, as Benjamin says, “cover the original” or “block its light” (260).
I am glad I had the opportunity to use my knowledge of a second language to help a student think more deeply about words and their meanings. In some ways, as students and as consultants, we are always translating, between and within languages.
Source:
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings: 1913-1926, Volume 1. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Published February 17, 2015
