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Thursday, July 19, 2012

Translation Diary, Entry #11

This is a page from my draft.


I'm now in the process of reading my text, separate from the source text, and making sure that it really sounds like English. Then I'll go back and make sure I've not inadvertently corrupted anything. Where it says QUOTATION, it's not that I was stuck, but rather that I want to go back and translate that quotation from the original Arabic so that I'm not giving a Qur'ān translation mediated through a Spanish translation. What really caught my attention on this page, though, is in the sixth line from the bottom, where I completely inverted the order of three words: "gently rustling trees" becomes "trees gently rustling." It's interesting because often the adjective-noun order in Spanish and English are complete opposites. And while that's sort of what's happening here, I don't think it's Hispanizing syntax, or the desire to avoid it, that is guiding it; it's more just two options within the bounds of English syntax, and the one works better here than the other.

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