translating with an accent

What should a translations sound like?

They should certainly reflect the original - which will included dialect and accent:

Translation is a tough enough discipline at the best of times, but when accents and dialects are factored in it becomes a real test of a linguist’s skills. So anyone hoping to use free software to translate something where accents are involved should give up now!

You may think that producing translations where the source includes a variety of dialects is something you’ll rarely be called upon to do, but everything from classic works of literature to Disney films makes use of accents as a way of fleshing out characters. By simply wiping all accents out, and making all of the characters speak a standardised version of the target language, the translator significantly alters the way the character is perceived by the reader.

Accents and Dialects: A Thorny Issue for Translators | Language Insight

Nelson Mandela famously said “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” That’s exactly why businesses need to consider regions as well as languages by using a localised translation service and dialect translator when translating content.

Translating Dialects And Interpreting Accents - Global Voices

Lost sales opportunities. Lost depth of character. Miscommunication between two people who, in theory, speak the same language. Glossing over differences between accents and dialects can be a recipe for disaster in all sorts of situations.

Would all of the characters in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn be as good if their dialogue was blankly rendered into standard American English? Would a misused dialect word instantly kill off your chances of connecting with your new target audience?

Accents and Dialects in Translation

Much has been said about translation’s challenges, joys, and nuanced politics of choice – of the decision-making it necessitates. Perhaps not many people think simultaneously in two (or more) languages, two cultures, two texts as intimately as a translator. In the course of engaging with the rewarding art of translating a text – and translating a reader, as the writer, poet and translator A K Ramanujan saw it – I found myself struck by thoughts on language and specifically on literature in India, far more than I wanted to be, some days. These evolving, shape-shifting metaphors and ideas started with an untethered phrase: ‘to translate with an accent’...

I submit to you this: could we as translators cultivate a practice of translating with an accent? And editors and readers process it and read it, respectively, while noticing said accent? I understand this is a tricky premise to begin with, for the lines between foreignisation and domestication are constantly shifting, the blurriness between the choices blurred further by the translator’s own language, experiences, and so on. But what if we could find a way to retain a phrase here, a word there, to remind the reader that the text comes from another language; that, in reading an unfamiliar word, they have just learnt something new, have learnt a word which they might never use themselves but whose meaning, should they see it again, they might remember? In doing so, in my case, Kannada gains another reader. It goes without saying that there is a fine balance to be sought, between keeping some source language and ensuring a reader in English (in this case) is not met with an impenetrable target text. Here is where I shall argue that we, as various parties in this transfer between cultures, should, instead of trying to contort the source language to fit the English idiom, look for ways to stretch English so that it too can speak somewhat with the accent of the original language. Because, devoid of the musicality with which retained accents enrich the translation, we would remain separate languages and cultures, condemned to bear the burden of the proper in our unaccommodating, un-elastic cultural lives.

Working in the English language as an Indian with many languages is a process in negotiating with its politics every other day. Decolonising the mind, and then our outer worlds, and therefore our culture is but a lifelong attempt. In the meanwhile, though, I wonder if perhaps we could see the English language, in this context, for its elasticity. Language is meant to stretch this way and that; when an elastic band snaps back in place, it often no longer retains its perfect round shape. When we speak with an accent, write with one, translate with many, the palimpsest of language loses not much, but stretches across the artificiality of bridges and borders. Like that only, as we would say here in India.

To Translate with an Accent – PEN Transmissions

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