Translation couplet is a procedure of translating cultural references which combines two, three or four of the methods mentioned above. Let us now examine how this method is used in the Vietnamese translation and their impact on representing protagonists of Irish contemporary female popular fiction.
ST: I was looking for one who didn’t look at me askance when I mentioned The
Partridge Family […] not one who made me feel inadequate because I couldn’t
tell the difference between Piat d’Or and Zinfandel. (Keyes, 2003: 6)
TT: Người đó sẽ không nhìn tôi như một đứa dở hơi nếu tôi nhắc đến bộ phim truyền hình sitcom dài tập The Partridge Family. Không phải mấy tên làm tôi ngượng chín người vì tôi không phân biệt rượu Piat d’Or và Zinfandel (Keyes,2010: 11)
[I looked for a person who would not look at me as if I was silly if I mentioned TV sitcom series The Partridge Family [..] not those guys who made me feel so embarrassed because I couldn’t differentiate between wine Piat d’or and Zinfandel]
The Partridge Family is an American series, which was shown on Irish
television in 1970s, mainly for children and girls in their early teens, with the central figure of Keith Patridge as a male heart-throb. Piat d’or and Zinfandel are two cheap brands of wine in the UK, originating from France and America respectively. The presence of these cultural references is aimed at portraying Claire as an ordinary woman, who enjoys sitcom series and has no idea about the differences between types of alcohols. The direct translation gives target language audiences a basic understanding of what these cultural references mean, but the
126
target audience may not be able to understand why it is silly to mention a sitcom or why the main character feels embarrassed when she cannot tell the difference between two brands of wine.
ST: God, I was horrific! I looked as if I was wearing my big sister’s Michelin Man suit.(Keyes, 2003: 34)
TT: Trời ơi! Tôi hoảng sợ. trông tôi giống như Michelin Man*.
( *: hình người biểu tượng cho hãng sản xuất lốp xe Michelin (Pháp) nổi tiếng trên thế giới, được cách điệu từ hình các lốp xe nên trông như người béo (Keyes, 2010: 31)
[Oh God. I was scared. I looked like Michelin Man*
( *: the symbol of the world famous tyre production company Michelin ( France), which was designed based one the shape of tyres, therefore it looks like a fat person) ]
The Michelin Man, which is sometimes used ironically as a term to describe someone who is obese, is mentioned in this example to refer to the body of Claire after giving birth to her baby. It is a characteristically feminine self- deprecating image of having excessive weight in the Western world, and it reflects a typically female preoccupation with one’s figure. It is interesting to observe that, in the source text, Claire describes herself as if she was wearing a Michelin Man suit, while in the target text, she looks like Michelin Man. The footnote explanation used in translation has helped the target audience to understand how the main character looks and feels in this case. This example illustrates the couplet chracteristics of this method when a culture specific reference is translated directly into the target language and is coupled with an explanation for target readers. According to Newmark (1998), this translation procedure is the most accurate and
127
complete. This example is also an example of the didactic function that translation may have.
ST: I would read my child feminist diatribes instead, I decided.[…] The Female Eunuch for example. (Keyes, 1995)
TT: Tôi sẽ đọc cho Kate những thứ liên quan đến tư tưởng nam nữ bình quyền. Nhất quyết thế. […] The Female Eunuch chẳng hạn* (*: sách của tác giả người Úc Germaine Greer, góp phần quan trọng trong phong trào đấu tranh đòi bình quyền nữ giới) (Keyes, 2010)
[I would read Kate things about man-woman equality. That is for sure. Read The Female Eunuch * (*: a book by an Australian author Germaine Greer, which contributed an important part to the campaign for the equality of women]
The translator may have assumed that The Female Eunuch may appear to be an unknown cultural reference to Vietnamese readers, therefore the translator uses transference with a footnote to explain the meaning of the term for Vietnamese readers. Thanks to this method, Vietnamese target readers can fully understand the cultural reference and therefore, understand the heroine’s idea of reading books on feminism to her child. However, it should also be noticed that while for Irish readers, it can be seen as the heroine’s sense of humour since she finds herself too dependent on her husband and she is self-deprecating; the Vietnamese reader may not see that sense of self-deprecation.
ST: She never let anyone else get a go of the Patrick Cox shoes, not even the girls with size-five feet. And her generosity with bitchy and untrue personal comments had earned her the nickname Slanderella.
TT: Cô chưa bao giờ chia sẻ những đôi giày Patrick Cox với bất kì ai, kể cả những cô nàng có cỡ chân số năm. Và sự hào phóng đưa ra những lời nhận xét riêng tư, bịa đặt, đầy ác ý về người khác đã mang lại cho cô biệt hiệu Slanderella. *
128
[she never shared Patrick Cox shoes with anyone, even the girls who had size five feet. And her generosity of giving private, fabricating, ill will comments about others has brought her the nickname Slanderella * ]
[*coming from the words slander, which means fabricating a false story or telling lies]
In the original, the female character appears to be a greedy and mean person. She loves expensive shoes and making up stories about other people. Patrick Cox is not a well-known brand in Vietnam, so readers of the translation may not understand why she never allows anyone to acquire these shoes. It is interesting that a bossy person who never lets anyone wear certain shoes in the original version becomes a selfish person who never shares in the translation. A footnote coming with an explanation gives readers a full understanding of what the heroine's nickname Slanderella, means but the humorous tone is lost since readers with little or no background in English may not recognise that her nickname is a combination of Slander and Cinderella and in a way it fuctions as a pun to portray the heroine as a type of evil character with Cinderella look, which to some extent illustrates how good at disguising herself the female character is.
As can be seen, the method of translation couplet using footnotes, turns out to be an effective way of rendering cultural references because the nature of this method helps readers not only know what the cultural references involved in various contexts means but also know the original SL name so he/she can identify it.
129 5.2.6 Omission
Some passages, which contain some cultural references, are not presented in the Vietnamese translation.
ST: Christmas two years ago Holly had gone shopping with Sharon for a dress for the annual ball they attended at the Burlington Hotel. (Ahern, 2004: 12) ST: That Christmas Holly had spent a disgraceful amount of money in Brown Thomas on the most beautiful white dress she had ever seen. (Ahern, 2004: 13)
ST: “Well, as long as you don't want Jennifer Aniston's hairstyle, you'll have no problems. (Ahern, 2004: 29)
ST: Buy the damn thing. It's Christmas after all, the season of giving and all that. (Ahern, 2004: 13)
These extracts come from Holly’s flashback when she thinks about the time when her husband was still alive. These cultural references are important in the way they provide readers with another side of Holly’s character, as she used to enjoy shopping, the holiday season and have an interest in fashion and style when her husband was still alive. These references also offer a contrastive insight into Holly’s life and how it has changed since the death of her husband.
There are also several examples in which extracts with cultural references are rendered into Vietnamese, but the cultural references are omitted.
ST: There's a few biscuits there to go with your tea. Jammie Dodgers, your favorite. (Ahern, 2004: 19)
130
TT: Có một ít bánh quy để cậu dùng kèm với trà. Loại bánh mà cậu thích nhất đấy. (Ahern, 2007: 25)
[There are some biscuits for you to go with your tea. Your most favourite biscuit] ST: Her parents' house was situated directly across the road from Portmarnock beach, the blue flag bearing testament to its cleanliness. (Ahern, 2004: 27) TT: Ngôi nhà thơ ấu của Holly nằm cạnh bờ biển Portmanock. (Ahern, 2007: 19) [the house of Holly’s childhood is situated next to beach Portmanock]
Jammie Dodgers are a popular brand of biscuits, named after a character from a comic. Portmarnock beach is situated in County Dublin and is considered to be an up-market, affluent part of the county. These references reveal part of Holly’s identity including her family background. The additional information about “blue flag” status of Pormarnock beach helps source text readers to understand how clean this beach is. Neither of these culture specific details has been rendered into Vietnamese.
Due to these omissions, information or effect from the ST is omitted. Since it has impossible to find out the reasons for such omission due to the unwillingness to give an interview and answer emails of the translators/editors, it can only be assumed that the omitted information may appear to be unimportant to the editors/translators and that they wanted to focus on other features of the text. However, since these cultural references play a certain role in representing the female character, readers of translation may not have full understanding of the
131
representation of the female protagonist (her background, her contrast life before and after the husband’s death).
5.2.6 Conclusion
The short analysis of cultural references selected for the purpose of this research has revealed that certain features on the social and educational background of heroines in Irish Chick Lit are not fully represented in Vietnamese, no matter which method of translation is applied. When certain social norms or phenomena are similar in both cultures, and when some cultural elements have global characteristics, the translation tends to be more accurate and much closer to the original. At the same time, when some cultural references are unfamiliar, unimportant or when some norms are not socially accepted in the target culture, they are often treated in two ways, either by literal translation or omission. The former procedure is used when the references relate to the identity of the main character, and translations are sometimes accompanied by footnote explanations, whereas the latter procedure is applied when it is assumed by the translators that these references are not of importance. Consequently, this leads to the fact that the personality or the background of the female characters is not fully represented in the translation. In other words, it can be said that no matter which strategy is applied, there are always cases when the cultural references do not function in the similar way as they do in the SL culture due to the cultural gap between the SL and TL. However, it is vital to keep in mind that the analysis of cultural references
132
in this thesis is short and the number of examples is small and representative, therefore my conclusions can be only tentative.
5.3 The representation of women in Vietnamese translation
This section conducts a comparative analysis of the representation of women in five chosen texts mentioned in the methodology chapter of this thesis namely
P.S I Love You, Never too Late, Watermelon, Where Rainbows End, and Sushinfor Beginners. A detailed comparison of the source textual material and its
Vietnamese renderings will be conducted so that the main aim of investigating the representation of women in Vietnamese translation of Irish Chick Lit can be achieved.