Re: McGuffey Readers and animals

On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 10:41:46PM +0100, Carsten Becker wrote:
> Hey!
>
> So I downloaded the first McGuffey Reader and skimmed a bit
> through it. What gave me headache is that there are
> frequently mentioned everyday animals. Since the Ayeri are
> supposed to live on another planet, there are of course no
> dogs, cats, duck(ling)s and such per se. But I don't know
> enough about Biology and I can't draw well enough to make
> up own animals of the respective kinds. Should I simply
> make up words for these animals then? Should I mangle their
> Latin name or their German or their English name?
[...]
> I guess I should really make up names for animals and say
> that they're quite similar to ours. What did you others do
> in this case?
[...]

I have the same problem in Ebisédian and Tatari Faran. Ebisédian,
first of all, is set in a completely different universe, and the only
thing in common with the earth there is that the Ebisédi are human.
Everything else is radically different. Which means that in
translating animal names, I have to *really* improvise.

But, different universe or not, the common problem in both Ebisédian
and Tatari Faran is culture-clash. Tatari Faran is spoken on Earth,
but some aspects of san faran culture are incompatible with how things
are depicted in the Reader.

For example, they don't have such things as pet dogs that children
play with. The closest they have is the packs of guard wolves they
keep---but you'd hardly let a child play with one of those wolves.
There aren't any domestic dogs in Fara---there may be the odd coyote
but you don't let children play with them, just as you would rather
children not play in fox holes.

And then there's the pet *cats*... in Fara, there are only wild cats
and lynxes. Lynxes are significantly more vicious than your typical
housecat, and stockier too. Again, not the type of animal you'd have
your children cuddle up with.

As for ducks... these are *food* for the san faran. When they see a
duck in a pond, their reaction is not "oh how cute", but "look!
Dinner!" Now, you might think that's rather barbaric, but the san
faran would call us modern, supposedly-cultured people, equally
barbaric, especially for eating cattle and other farm-raised animals.
In Fara, it is considered vulgar to eat a domestically-raised animal.
Meat is a delicacy deserved only if you *hunt* the animal. Raising an
animal and then killing it for food is as repulsive to the san faran
as eating your own children.

Now some kinds of birds *are* kept as pets... but confining them in
cages is regarded as cruel and inhumane. So you can just imagine the
contradiction that arises in that lesson where a girl is playing with
her pet bird with a cage in the background---the symbol of cruelty to
animals---and the text claims that she loves the bird very much.

And I've not gotten to the part about hats and caps yet. In Fara,
nobody except clowns and fools wears hats. Respectable men wear
turbans, and respectable women wear shawls. :-) The word for 'helmet'
itself is derogatory and jocial when used in that sense.

The problem with the McGuffey Reader is that it is rather culturally
biased. But you really don't have a choice---what else would you write
about in a Reader for children, if not culturally-specific things such
as dogs and cats for pets?  Some culture, somewhere, would have some
taboo against just about anything you might write about.  If you take
away these things there'd be nothing left to write about.  Nothing
interesting, at least. I much prefer to adapt the idea of the Readers
and re-write it as appropriate for the san faran, than to insist on
only translating culturally-neutral, whitewashed boring prose.

The adaptation approach also has its linguistic merits: the structure
of the Readers, from what I can tell so far, is that words are slowly
introduced and then repeated often for reinforcement. Well, the
problem is that this requires one to choose the simplest, most
frequently used set of words to begin with. Such frequent words as
"have" or "can" are used in idiomatic ways only possible in English.
Even such constructs as "a girl on a horse" and "a frog on a rock" are
translated differently in Tatari Faran: to literally translate "on a
horse" gives the rather ridiculous idea of somebody standing on the
head of a horse, or someone lying limp across a horse (whatever that
means). You don't get "on" a horse; you *ride* a horse. Similarly, you
don't "have" anything; you *own* things or *carry* things. Also, you
don't "run at" things; you *chase* things. Running is running, and
chasing is chasing. English conflates the two in a single verb, but
you can't do that in Tatari Faran.

So the result is that the current Tatari Faran translation of the
McGuffey Readers kinda defeats the whole purpose, in that it does not
make sense culturally (the idea of children playing with wolves is
rather ridiculous), and many different words are introduced all at
once to substitute for the same English verb, and the Review sections
contain new words because the English version uses existing words in a
way that requires a different word in Tatari Faran.

In the end, I just decided to leave the current translation as a
"literal foreign text" rather than to try to correct these flaws. One
of these days I should do a better, more liberal adaptation of the
McGuffey Readers into Tatari Faran, one that makes sense culturally
and follows the spirit, not the letter, of the Readers.


T

--
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

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