During one of our classes
of Theory of Knowledge, we did a translation activity where everyone tried to
translate the same poem into different languages. The poem itself had many
literary and idiomatic meaning which caused different translations in the
presentation. As I mentioned in my previous blog post on language and
knowledge, I take both IBH Korean and IBH
Literature so I find it very difficult to translate one language to another.
Three rules of translation
are faithfulness, comprehensibility, and back translation. As I translated the
poem into Korean, I could relate to these rules because I always had many
problems when translating English to Korean because of the back translation. For
example, while translating the poem of “The Red Wheelbarrow”, I had to
translate the whole poem backwards in order to have the same meaning in Korean.
This is where the second rule comes into play as the translation should be
comprehensible. In order for other Koreans to understand the poem in the same
meaning, I needed to change the direction of the poem and specific uses of
words. When I translated my translation back to English, it said “Beside the
white chickens/ Glazing rainwater/ Red cart/ It depends on many”.
It is noticeable that the
original poem is very different from the translation. Through this activity, I
recognized the importance and difficulty of translating
a word into a different language while keeping the same exact meaning. I also learned about the three rules of translation and how they play a role as we process words into another language.
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