I pushed on. I thought it must be my fault for not enjoying it, so I just kept going, hoping things would get better. But as I read, I kept noticing these weird linguistic constructions in the text. each one distracting me and slowing me down. “Such is my trait!”, or “Do you hear? Do you hear?” Sentences that felt clunky and unnatural. “I was hoping to get round you, but you took up the right line at once!” The more dramatic of these odd constructions caused me to realize the entire text felt subtly unnatural for some reason. It felt like I was listening to someone speaking softly at a distance, and I had to strain to hear.

The issue, of course, was the translation. The translation I was reading was from 1914, and the English was dated. I switched translations to the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation from 1992, which came highly recommended online. Reading the new translation, things were better, but not much better. The whole thing still felt unnatural. I had heard Crime and Punishment was one of the greatest novels of all time, so I’d been excited to start reading it. But I found it difficult to get through. It wasn’t overly complex, I just found myself bored, not connecting to what I was reading. I couldn’t imagine Dostoevsky had simply written a stiff novel, so I wondered what was going on.

I recalled at that point other translated works I’d read had also felt unnatural in a similar way. Whether they’d been translated from French, Russian, Greek, or Japanese, it didn’t seem to matter. I wondered why all these translations felt so mediocre. Was translation just an inherently difficult thing to get right, or were all these translators making some mistake?

I tried to put myself in the shoes of a translator, and in doing so I realized the problem right away. The job of a translator is to stick as closely as possible to the source text. They are translating, after all, not rewriting. Readers would be incensed if they found out the translator had been altering details of the story willy-nilly — swapping out Raskolnikov’s axe for a machine gun, perhaps. Readers want to feel like they’re getting the authentic experience intended by the author. As such, translators who do anything more than a fairly literal translation are accused of “taking liberties”. This comes with a major issue: Russian with English words is not English.

Translators do change the text more than a literal word-for-word translation, because such a translation would be unreadable. But in my experience, their translations are still too literal. The sentences they produce, while valid, are unusual. The phrasal patterns used are often not common English phrasal patterns (though I expect they’re common in the source language). The result is text that an English reader can understand, but which feels strange. It gives a similar impression to a foreigner who has imported the sentence structure of their native language when they speak. (“How it looks like? Can you able to hear me?”)

According to construction grammar, a language consists not just of words, but of larger pieces, too: patterns of phrasing we learn alongside individual adjectives, nouns, and verbs. When I tell you to “break a leg” or “call it a day”, I’m not constructing these phrases from scratch. Instead, I’ve memorized them as singular units of language. These fixed expressions or idioms are the simplest phrasal patterns. However, there are more complex phrasal patterns that include “slots” for the speaker to fill in. Here are some examples:

Drive _______ crazy/mad. (He drove me crazy.)
If _______, then _______. (If it rains, then it gets wet.)
The _______ they _______, the _______ they _______. (The bigger they are, the harder they fall.) Notice that some slots can only take a verb, some can only take a comparative adjective, and so on.
_______ is the new _______. (Quiet is the New Loud; Orange is the New Black.)
I don’t know (if/whether or not) _______, but if _______, then _______. (I don’t know if it’s raining, but if it is, then you should bring an umbrella.)

There are thousands more. The majority of language consists of the repeated application of existing phrasal patterns. You can create new phrasal patterns on the fly if you need to, just as you can create new individual words. But just as a text littered with newly-coined words would be foreign-sounding and peculiar, a text filled with unusual phrasal patterns would be unusual, too. Phrasal patterns, not just individual words, are part of what make English English.

When translators adhere too strictly to the source text, what results are sentences that feel clunky and harder to read. They make this mistake in the name of accuracy, but a translated work which fails to give the same impression as the original text cannot be called accurate.

The most egregious example I saw while reading the second translation came in the form of a footnote (you don’t need to know the plot of Crime and Punisment for this). In the original Russian — so the footnote says — when Dunia is talking to Svidrigailov, she switches to addressing him with familiar second person singular pronouns, which Russians generally only use with family and friends. This indicates to the (Russian) reader a level of familiarity between Dunia and Svidrigailov greater than the reader previously thought. It is supposed to be a surprising revelation. Unfortunately, English no longer¹ has a formal/informal distinction in its second person pronouns, so all we get instead is a footnote. To me, this seems akin to doing a shoddy construction job on purpose, but bolting a plaque to the building afterward explaining why you did a bad job. It’s true, English does not communicate familiarity through pronouns, so if you aim for a strictly literal translation, there’s not much you can do. But why would you ever want a strictly literal translation if it utterly fails to give the same impression as the original? The pronoun shift has a “strong effect for the Russian reader”, leaving them shocked and excited. The English reader, on the other hand, is interrupted by a dry description of how this moment would have been really dramatic for them if only they spoke Russian. English can’t communicate familiarity through pronouns, but we obviously have other ways of doing so, like nicknames, diminutives, terms of endearment, informal language generally, use of “us”/”we”, and so on. There are a dozen options, all better and more accurate than a footnote.

Every translated work I’ve ever read has been under-translated to some degree. Translators who translate correctly are accused of taking too many liberties, so translators stick to overly literal translations in the name of accuracy. If criticized, a literal translator can always fall back on the source text to defend themselves. This is a luxury idiomatic translators don’t have, leading to an abundance of overly-literal translations. Readers don’t notice how bad the translations are because, when a translated book feels more challenging than it should be, most people just assume they must not be sophisticated enough for the book. It’s true that as a reader you have to expect to overcome some linguistic friction. Even within a language, patterns shift over time, and every writer has their own unique way of writing that takes getting used to. But what frustrates me is when extra, unnecessary friction is added due to mistranslation.

Readers of translated works may miss out on some of the best ideas humanity has to offer. Not because they’re stupid, but because Russian wearing English clothing is not English. Without me realizing it at the time, this issue is what led me to rephrase the Enchiridion in Plain English. The Enchiridion contains such incredible wisdom, yet several people I know have given up on it, calling it too difficult. Because Ancient Greek with English words is not English. I have read a bunch of translations of the Enchiridion, and none of them sound natural to a modern reader. Mistranslations caused by under-translation are a commonplace tragedy that make readers feel stupider than they are.

P.S. I did manage to finish Crime and Punishment in spite of the poor translations. Translation issues aside, it was… not very good. It was good at points. It even made me laugh out loud once. But I was bored by it. Partly due to the bad translation, but partly due to the fact that the novel just isn’t that good. At first I thought maybe I was just an uneducated philistine who couldn’t appreciate its genius, but then I read Vladamir Nabakov’s debunking of Dostoevsky, and it put me at ease. I am not an idiot for thinking Dostoevsky’s writing is not very good. His ideas are interesting, and his grasp of the human nature of normal people is exceptional. But he has a “pre-Freudian” understanding of mental illness, as Nabakov charitably put it. Crime and Punishment lacks character development, is long winded, and is quite shallow. The clearest sign of his inadequacy as a writer is that he tends to make his protagonists insane, because he can’t make them behave in ways any sane character would act. (They don’t even behave realistically for an insane person!) The moment-to-moment dialogue feels realistic for how people genuinely talk, but besides that there’s not much there. He’s still a better writer than me, though.

P.P.S When I was a young kid, I asked my mom to tell me how to say a few words in French. I figured from those few words I could figure the rest of the language out pretty quickly. I thought languages were codes, where the individual letters were simply rotated through the alphabet, like ROT13. When people think AI are going to solve translation, I feel people are making a similar mistake, but at the word level rather than the letter level. They think there is a single straightforward way to translate from a source language to a target language. There’s not. As much as I’ve shit on translators here and think they can do much better than they’ve historically done, I acknowledge that translation inherently implies interpretation, and interpretation of texts generally requires general intelligence. You have to understand with excruciating precision what the source text is saying to re-render that meaning in another language. That is to say, AI won’t solve translation until it solves everything else, too.

We used to have thou (singular, familiar) and you (plural, formal). Nowadays people mistake ‘thou’ as being fancy and formal because it’s dated, but at the time it was the casual term you’d use when talking to a friend. ↩

Footnotes

Secret Rich Text Copyer for Substack