By Zhihua Wang
October 11, 2019
If you love a poem written in a language other than English, you can translate it into English and enjoy it being read by more readers. Here are the steps I normally do.
Google Translate is my first step. I will type in the whole poem in the website and let the software translate it automatically. Even though it will not be the final version, the word choice the software picks may be different from mine, which often generates fresh ideas.
As poetry has such an imaginative and rhyming character, word choice is most important in the translation. The advantage is that English has such a large vocabulary, idioms and short phrases, so there are always choices. I usually use a thesaurus to pick a word that rhymes. If you could not find a rhymed word, you could also change the sentence structure to get it. My other rules are: instead of nouns, use verbs; instead of one word, use short phrases; instead of big words, use simple words. By using these rules, I can make my translation more vivid and simpler, so readers can grasp the meaning, image, or emotion of the poem after their first reading.
As a non-native English speaker, I always feel unsure whether the English word I choose gives the right image or not, so I use Google Image. Type in the word in Google, then choose Image on the bar list to see if the images shown match with the image I want or not. For example, in one poem, I wanted to find the right word to describe beautiful, long, flowing hair just like the effect of shampoo advertisements, so I referred to Google Image to see what images it would generate for words like “flying hair”, “flowing hair”, “vortex” and “whirlpool” etc. Then I go to the writing center or writing club to get grammar correction and feedback for my first draft. People in these places are language experts and they usually give me genuine and reliable feedback. I also share my translation with my friends, peers and professors — it is another way to collect feedback and improve your translation. In my mind, good translation is a team effort with a lot of revisions.