The Linguist

Chartered Institute of Linguists WINTER 2024 The Linguist 15 FEATURES seem obvious, it might only be so to some viewers, perhaps of a certain age range. Catering to the kids Creativity in the context of exhibition worksheets is an important element in engaging younger audiences. The following Chinese-English translation from a Hong Kong museum provides a striking example of how creative usage can itself be creatively handled. The text is from a worksheet page that encourages children to examine the colours of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. The title and first two sentences read: 青出於藍。青花 瓷器上的花紋, 是綠色的嗎? 可不是呢! 是藍 色的。('Blue comes out of indigo. Are the patterns on the blue-and-white porcelain vessels green? Absolutely not! They're blue.') However, in English, the text was rendered as: 'Out of the Blue. Have you heard of underglaze blue porcelain or blue and white porcelain? They're actually the same!' The Chinese title, Qing chu yu lan ('Blue comes out of indigo'), is a four-character idiom which more metaphorically means 'the student surpasses the teacher'. Here, however, this meaning is absent: the idiom is used simply as a playful way of referring to the blue theme of the porcelain. Neither a translation of the metaphorical meaning nor of the surface meaning will work. Instead, the translator has chosen another equally recognisable set phrase from the target language: 'Out of the blue'. The rendering is especially clever because it retains some sense of the source text's 'out of' construction while managing to keep the phrasing short. The two short opening sentences also deserve comment as they again require creative handling. In our literal English reference translation, the question asking if the blue patterns are green, followed by the confirmation 'Absolutely not! They're blue', might seem somewhat ridiculous. Yet in the Chinese, worksheet users are simply being asked to disambiguate the word qing, which here means blue, but which can also mean green or even dark or black. In English, a direct translation won't work, because unlike Chinese, English lacks a hypernym that will cover all the colours implied by qing. The English translator has thus retained the question-and-answer format of the Chinese but used a different question that instead addresses the two different names for this kind of porcelain. Creative translation here avoids the eyeroll that a more literal rendering might induce in the worksheet's young users. These various examples of creative handling ultimately remind us that creativity is at the heart of much museum translation. Indeed, as the translator Judith Rosenthal has written, such translation is fundamentally "a creative act". 3 For more on this subject, see Robert Neather's new book Translating for Museums, Galleries and Heritage Sites, published by Routledge. Notes 1 Baxandall, M (1985) Patterns of Intention: On the historical explanation of pictures, New Haven and London, Yale University Press 2 Ibid, 9 3 Rosenthal, J (2021) 'Behind the Scenes – A career as an art translator'. In Ahrens, B, Krein- Kühle, M and Wienen, U, Translation – Kunstkommunikation – Museum / Translation – Art Communication – Museum, Berlin, Frank & Timme, 179-198 © SHUTTERSTOCK © PEXELS

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