I’m struggling badly with revising the Dogtown translation. The biggest problem? My writing. It’s awful, nowhere near the quality of his signing. His style is poetic and rather compelling. Mine? Clunky, heavy, telly-than-showy, and painfully bad.
The second problem? A realisation that while translating BSL to English might be easy enough, being faithful to his voice is bloody impossible. No matter what I do, my voice still dominates the translation, which makes me a ghost writer more than an anonymous translator. I honestly don’t know how to rectify this.
I think the core problem lies with the fact that interpreting BSL is almost always personal. I mean, it’s not quite like other foreign languages that have proper dictionaries and grammar guidebooks. You know, an established framework. BSL is almost a free-form foreign language.
There is, for instance, a sign that we call ‘vee’. It’s basically a tone marker and it depends on a facial expression to set up a context of what’s to come. Consider, for example, a range of facial expressions including disbelief, surprise, shock, amazement, anger, scepticism and so on in conjunction with ‘vee’, we would have something like these:
marker (+ facial expression) + “dialogue” = “translated dialogue”
vee (+ shock) + “What?” = “What?!”
vee (+ scepticism) + “What?” = “You serious?”
vee (+ disbelief) + “What?” = “Seriously?”
vee (+ angry) + “What?” = “Say it again.”
And let’s not forget the positive and negative aspects of an emotion, e.g.
vee (+ positive amazement) + “What?” = “No way…!”
vee (+ negative amazement) + “What?” = “Naw, no…!”
vee (+ positive disbelief) + “What?” = “Ha ha, for real?”
vee (+ negative disbelief) + “What?” = “We’re so fucked if that’s true.”
Straightforward translations, but without nuances.
Let me use one example of Adam using ‘vee’:
vee (+ negative horror) + “You? Why…?”, which can be translated to “It was you?”
He used the nuance of “betrayal”. This is where each interpreter has to decide how to portray that through “It was you?” I went for “It was you all along?” A friend disagreed, saying it should be “It was you who betrayed me?” I felt this was too heavy-handed. But we can’t debate on this further because of the following line:
past tense marker (+ positive anger) + “They already aware?” = “Everyone knew?”
This affects the previous line, like so:
vee (+ negative horror) + “You? Why…?” + past tense marker (+ positive anger) + “They already know? From the beginning? All?”
Friend’s translation: “They knew from the beginning? Why haven’t you said anything?”
Friend #2′s translation: “Why didn’t you tell me about the others knowing?”
My translation: “The others knew from the start? Why…? Why did you wait to tell me until now?”
So yeah, as you see, it’s not consistent, which makes me rather neurotic about my translation. And furthermore, the deadline is this Friday with Rachel and two other people expected to receive copies. Yet I’m roughly 1/3 done.
Not only that, I’m late with two tasks that were supposed to be done a while ago. I struggled badly with one of those tasks because it involved a lot of numbers, but I found out yesterday I didn’t have to do this. In short I could have finished it two weeks ago if it wasn’t for those numbers issue.
*hysterical laughter*
Let me show you how bad my English is with this unedited excerpt of the Dogtown translation:
Rules. There were many rules. All crammed into my head since the day I was born. I was constantly told: never forget the rules. Just what those rules were, I never knew. I never cared, to tell you the truth. With so many rules to remember, I figured it was all bullshit. But I wish I had remembered them all because if I had, I’d still be standing here next to my brother. The two of us alone in this broken world.
It was just me now. It wasn’t over [yet?], either. I can’t remember when it started to go wrong. My memory wasn’t what it used to be. Got my head bashed in too many times during our war last few months, I guess. Got to remember before their darkness would infect me like how it had my brother.
Maybe seven months ago, it started with the rumours about two police officers and three twelve-year-old deaf girls: Helen, Louise and Parveen. You know, those girls from [???]. Those police officers had been making money by pimping them to random night-shift lorry drivers in the car park of a motorway cafe, off the M1.
No one believed the rumours. Didn’t want to believe. Everyone figured those police officers couldn’t be that dumb. They were police officers, weren’t they? Those who weren’t sure talked to the girls, to see if there was some truth to the rumours, but they wouldn’t talk. When Alan Cready tried to force them to talk, they simply closed their eyes and turned their heads away, cutting off the only road of communication. We had to let it go.
It didn’t kicked in for real until Louise’s loser dad, Paul Yardley, came storming through a side entrance of the Our Lady of the Lourdes Deaf Club, drunk and enraged. The crowd parted, leaving a path for him to go through. He stopped in middle of the club floor, glaring around as he swayed slightly with his fists in air. Looking for a fight. Or somebody.
Years of boxing [???] deep in his face. His nose, a flattened lump of angry veins. His eyes, watery blue that once was deep ocean blue, were partly hidden under a cliff of criss-crossed scars where eyebrows were. Both halves of his ears were missing; bitten off years ago by boxers he once fought. His cheeks–it was the weirdest thing about his face–were lumpy. Like, there were small pebbles hidden beneath his stretched grey-tinted cheek skin. Me best friend, Robbie, reckoned those pebble-like lumps were broken pieces of cheek bones that couldn’t knit together. Yardley’s hair were — long [???] of black, white and grey– [???] over his thin bony shoulders beneath plain blue t-shirt. As always, he had those jeans. Those had got to be around long before I was born. He looked like a wizard but in the wrong clothes, in the wrong place, in the wrong time period. He had pride in his feet but now, those feet carried a ton. Nothing like the man he used to be. Everyone knew it was the hearing people who made him that way.
When he was a young ‘un, they [?????something about discovering something in him????]. As he shot through the ranks, he thought he was doing better than everyone in our world. He was right at the top of the world. He had the money to show for it. He didn’t have to work in a factory, a coal mine or some shit like that. He could afford to buy a house without a social worker’s stupid permission. And so he did, with a semi-detached for his pregnant wife and their little children, Elaine and Matthew.
Yardley thought he was respected because of a nickname those hearing people gave him: the Deaf Hammer. He thought he had it all. He was still too stupid to see he could only be useful as long as he can survive bare-fist boxing matches where rules didn’t exist. No gloves, no rules, and fight until one went down. He beat them all. Knocked one, two, three down in a row. Old Mike, who sneaked in one of those illegal matches, said Yardley was like a machine. No matter how hard the opponent tried to knock him down, he kept jumping up and kept going for it. Kept bashing, bashing, bashing until the opponent was out cold. At 28, with a house and the money to his name, he seemed set for life.
He never saw it coming. The ultimate punch.
Never expected them to abandon his semi-comatose body to a back alley, either. Nor did he expect to lie there for like two days until a rent boy and his punt found him lying in the rain. The rent boy – Sean Keene, that was his name – told us later his punt ran off, saying he would make a 999 call. Sean decided to stay because he didn’t think it was right for a person to die alone, not after catching Yardley’s thousand-yard stare. He knelt next to Yardley’s body and talked.
He didn’t know then Yardley wouldn’t be able to hear his words of comfort, let alone lip-read. Regardless–he stayed, talking continuously and holding Yardley’s sluggish stare, until the white headlights of a five-door panda car and an ambulance appeared through the dark rain.
When Yardley discharged himself from hospital a month later, he went straight to those people for an explanation, still believing it was a misunderstanding, but they went underground. He asked around but no one gave up the details. We guessed they thought Yardley may have told the police about them, but they didn’t know him like we knew him. He was loyal. The kind that would die for family and friends. Yardley didn’t get it until that day, though. Didn’t get he was an expendable lump of flesh. Can only be useful as long as he could keep cash flowing. The moment they thought his cash flow dried up inside a dock warehouse, they ran.
He never got over it. What did he expect? I may be only a kid back then, but I knew hearing people weren’t interested in deaf people as friends, and never will. As my brother used to say: hearing people can only tolerate, use, abuse or ignore deaf people. There was loads of history to back that up. The dumb fuck was twenty eight and still didn’t get it until then.
**It near destroyed him. Their abandonment threw all his words – four years’ worth of defending those hearing people to all deafies – back at his face. It was the ultimate act of humiliation. It wasn’t just his money or living-hood gone. It was his standing in the community as well. His credibility, destroyed. His reputation, down the drain. The worthiness of his word, useless. I once explained the relationship between honour and trust to a hearing classmate at school and that when a deaf person endorses a hearing person, he’s risking his entire reputation. If the hearing person betrays him by letting deaf people down, the deaf person loses everything. His word. His reputation. His judgement. Everything. The hearing classmate didn’t get it.**
**I should have known better. He was hearing. It wasn’t like that in his world. That was why he didn’t get it. But we knew what it meant the moment we heard what happened. We understood how it would be from there on for Yardley. Our instinctive understanding came from something deep inside the major molecule of our Deaf DNA. Like that poem: “You have to be deaf to understand.” Yardley gambled and instead of proving history wrong, he fell into the sea.**
He became a walking cliché by finding home in a bottle of [???], but he still had his house and his family. I won’t be like Yardley, though. Especially not like him right there then. Still standing in the middle of the deaf club. Still swaying with his reddened fists in air. Still glaring at everyone. Still thought he had it, but he looked every inch of forty-one and fucked in the head.
“Where’s Louise?” Yardley snarled through his hands, still swaying as he turned in a circle. “Where’s my youngest daughter! Where? I’ll kill you all if you don’t tell me!”
I didn’t know at the time that he forgot the rules.
** These two were the first of many difficult paragraphs to translate. He used quite a few BSL signs that don’t have suitable English replacements. It was a bit of a struggle. Plus I still don’t understand what he meant by “fell into the sea”, though. It does sound familiar, but I still don’t get it. I felt I should just leave this literal translation as it is, in case someone does get it.
But yeah, as you see, it’s quite bad. I’ll have to admit to Rachel that while I had no problem translating Adam’s story, my crappy writing skill is the biggest problem. I’m going to advise her to hire a qualified BSL interpreter who can write decently.