The invented language component of Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange poses many problems for translators. Indeed, one of the purposes of this blog and the Ponying the Slovos project is to leverage how these problems work to reveal translation strategies. But it is not the only component which offers challenges to translators.
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Earlier this week, the scholar George Steiner died. Along with Umberto Eco, he was among the last of the great 20th century polymaths whose indomitable intellect and gimlet eye was drawn to translation as art, craft and science.
Steiner’s text on translation, After Babel (1973) has gone through numerous reprints and three separate editions, and casts a long shadow over the still nascent discipline of Translation Studies. It long predates many other influential texts in the arena, including Eco’s belated works, Experiences in Translation (2000) and Mouse or Rat? (2003).
Cette traduction surprendra peut-être d’abord le lecteur par certaines curiosités du vocabulaire.
This translation will perhaps at first surprise the reader due to certain oddities of vocabulary
You have to love the understatement with which Georges Belmont and Hortense Chabrier start their translators’ note which prefaces the French translation of A Clockwork Orange (our translation).
The Belmont/Chabrier translation is an astonishing piece of writing, and the fact that it has remained in print since first publication almost fifty years ago bears evidence to that. We have looked closely at what they have achieved, and how their “French-Nadsat” compares with Burgess’s original, in a new peer-reviewed article in Meta journal, volume 65 (3).