A really good example of why you should know a bit about the speaker before the talk. And I'm that unlucky person who didn't bother to read Yasmine Seale's bio carefully before the talk. I was actually admiring how smoothly she transitioned from translating French to translating Arabic, considering that these two are languages I really love, but they are fundamentally dissimilar. Arabic is characterized by its conciseness, while French is a gender-marked cumbersome language where even 99 is "quatre-vingt-dix-neuf". So, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to translate from such sources into English or other languages.
And then she said, "I was thinking of translating several French works then return to my life(?), and suddenly there's the One Thousand and One Nights for me to translate, which helped me become a freelance translator." At that moment, I was wondering why an ordinary French translator would suddenly receive a translation job for a masterpiece that's not even in a mutually translatable language? Haven't people wanted to translate One Thousand and One Nights anymore? It was only after the talk ended that I had time to Google about her, and by the way, her website https://www.yasmineseale.com/ seems very personalized to me, including the illustrations (Arabic pictographs) and layout. There are numerous amazing translation work done by her!
As a translator, love for the original book is essential; otherwise, this work would be difficult to continue. But what if this classic has already been translated by many people? What should the translator do to make it shine again for readers? We talked about the publishing process in Hahn's workshop, and most books don't have this worry, especially those with limited audiences. When I mentioned Harry Potter as an example, he indicated that this was a completely different case. Firstly, being such a famous book, there is demand from audiences worldwide, and for enthusiastic fans, there's also a collectible value. Yasmine Seale believes in incorporating her own understanding of the story and the protagonist into the translation (in my opinion, this is the advantage of reading the entire book before translating). For example, Shahrazad faces the fear of potential death the next day, so Yasamine would add some "finallyness" to the translation language. Also, because this book is mostly about bedtime stories and dreams, she would add a vague feeling, just like in a dream—following the dream logic of the story. I strongly agree with this idea and how her own depiction of the text makes the story more easily imaginable, fitting the atmosphere. She accepts each translation rather than criticizing or comparing it with other translations.
Three concepts were introduced: style, structure, and sensibility, each accompanied by interesting images corresponding to her explanation. These three respectively correspond to the style of the text, the carrier of the story, and the form of the story. The examples she presented were also very amusing, where the musical feeling inherent in Arabic itself was retained in the translation of the original text, making it difficult for native readers to grasp. The format of One Thousand and One Nights is originally "1000+1," a continuous continuation and response. When literature becomes a movie, is it still important to have themes of relevance and format? (The recent adaptation of Murakami's book, "Drive My Car," did a great job of this, turning a very short story into a larger worldview and a derivative film). Every fragment of the story gradually becomes stories in touch.
Lastly some of my own thoughts: I really love Egyptian cultural history!!! It has been one of my favorite countries since my middle school, so I really like the Egyptian style expressed in a very different way in the story (both the layout and design). Her voice is really gentle; I feel like I could be listen to her telling bedtime stories for one thousand and one nights or more. In Yasmine Seale's translations that I've seen, they usually have texture and retain the classical vocabulary of the original text, which is actually very difficult to achieve. I will address this as well in Marjorie Salvodon's presentation. I feel that many translators/writers I've encountered usually live in Istanbul for a while, especially those translating works from the Middle East or West Asia. Apart from identity issues, it seems more like a literary sense inherent in Turkey.
Ruoyi.
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