When translating between languages and cultures as different as Chinese and English, the problem is the inadequacy of the target language to express the source. Chinese, with its incredible succinctness, can often express in a couple of characters what seems to need a phrase to say in English. It’s not surprising that sometimes, like the translator of the photo above, people just give up altogether!
Overtranslation has a range of meanings in translation theory, but here I will talk about translating things that don’t necessarily need to be explicitly translated. This is something we see quite regularly when we carry out quality reviews. Avoiding overtranslation can help your text read more naturally in English and make it more useful to the client.
Few people have “overtranslated” as much as Ezra Pound (1885-1972), the modernist poet who freely translated the works of Li Bai and others into English despite having little knowledge of Chinese. On occasion, he even translated each of the component parts of Chinese characters into English, as in the first line of the Analects:
Original text: 學而時習之，不亦說乎？
Overtranslation: To study with the white wings of time passing, is not that our delight?
A more natural translation: Is it not a pleasure, having learned something, to try it out at due intervals?
Here, he has understood the character xi 習 (to practice) in terms of its components yu 羽 (wing) and bai 白 (white) to get the translation “white wings”. This is wonderfully poetic, but unfortunately means that the emphasis on “repeated practice” in the original is missing.