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by shermantanktop
60 days ago
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I deal with similar issues. Translation is sometimes thought of as a mechanical process, but it is a creative process where the translator’s approach varies from subtle to heavy-handed. At some point the translation can be thought of as a new creative work, and that line is hard to define. One of my parents was a translator who worked directly with authors, and in the review process the author would expand or refine the text in ways that were not present in the original. At that point, which work is the true representation of the authors intent, the fixed original or the updated translation? |
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The tradition your parent was in (translator working directly with a living author) produces some of the most interesting edge cases in translation studies. Kundera is the famous one: he eventually treated the French translations of his Czech novels as the authoritative versions and had the Czech editions revised to match. Borges did something similar on a smaller scale with his English translators. Beckett translated himself between French and English and the two versions don't agree. In each case, "which is the book" is genuinely undecidable on textual grounds.
The decision I made early was that the database shouldn't try to decide. Every edition gets its own record with its own metadata. If an author revised through a translator, that shows up as a later-dated edition in the original language with a different publisher or an explicit translator credit; the relationship is visible but not adjudicated.
It turns out this is also the only stance that survives contact with reality across the national library catalogues I've integrated. Each catalogue already encodes its own editorial judgment about what counts as a "work," and forcing them into a single hierarchy produces more bugs than insights. Letting the plurality stand is both philosophically honest and, as it happens, technically cheaper.