RE: A subscriber asked me to forward this query to the List, especially to those who teach Russian literature in translation: Do you agree with VN's assessment of Garnett's translation? Which translation of Tolstoy's novel do you recommend instead?
To begin with: Recommend to whom? What purpose for?
In my PhD thesis, Comparative Translation Assessment: Quantifying Quality (2004), I suggested a simple method of formal assessment, Token Equivalence Method (TEM). The idea is elementary: the words in the original text are consecutively numbered, and if a translated counterpart is found, it gets the same number. As a result, one gets (within a chosen set of rules and within the limits of the chosen excerpts) the number of translated words (tokens), as well as the number of omissions and additions.
The TEM result is expressed in one figure, Translation Quotient (TQ), which is a percentage of the number of tokens preserved in the translation. Taken alone, TQs might be meaningless, but they can be either (1) correlated with the available conventional critical analyses, or (2) used as a background for further research. In my comparison of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" with its 19 English translations, the obtained TQs were triangulated with the numerous available conventional critical assessments, some comparing up to four versions, and showed a perfect fit with the latter, thus confirming the idea expressed in the title.
In Chapter Six of my monograph, I applied my method to other textual material, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina included. The table below presents the results from my thesis modified with the TQs obtained for two more translations (in bold) which I added later.
|
Translator |
Year |
TQ (%) |
|
Garnett, Constance |
1901 |
98 |
|
Magarshack, David |
1961 |
97 |
|
Carmichael, Joel |
1960 |
95 |
|
Wiener, Leo |
1899 |
93 |
|
Pevear, Richard / Volokhonsky, Larissa |
2000 |
92 |
|
Edmonds, Rosemary |
1954 |
88 |
|
The Maudes, Aylmer & Louise |
1929 |
84 |
|
Greenwood, E.B. |
1995 |
89 |
|
Townsend, Rochelle S. |
1912 |
76 |
To recap: Recommend to whom? What purpose for?
With Season’s Greetings and best wishes for the New Year,
Helsinki