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: