Translating "Hostile Witness" by millari
Original fic: "Hostile Witness" by millari. Translation: "Zeuge der Anklage" (will upload soon).
millari says it's okay if I say it was a bitch to translate. So, yeah, it was a bit of a bitch to translate. :D But it doesn't beat "Stakes." "Stakes" was harder. "Hostile Witness" was made up of moments where I was unsure about nuances. It's a story full of subtle observations, so there were a lot of those.
Let's start with the title. I tried for a literal translation first but found that I didn't like any variation I could come up with. The translation would have very different connotations from the original since "hostile" can both mean "feindlich" and "feindselig" -- the former implying that the witness is an enemy in war, the latter implying that the witness just doesn't want to cooperate. That's two very different things. Anyway, I'd have to add an article anyway ("The hostile witness" / "Der feindselige Zeuge"), which makes the title sound like it's been taken from a children's book. Long story short, I went with "Zeuge der Anklage" ("Witness of the accusation"), since I like titles to be matter-of-fact.
For those of you who don't know (i.e. mondenengel ;)): "Hostile Witness" is about the lawyer Romo Lampkin defending Gaius Baltar, who has been accused of having been a bad president, selling out his people and thinking with his penis instead of his brains (basically ;)). So Romo talks to Felix Gaeta who is scheduled to testify against Baltar. Contrary to the audience, Romo doesn't know that Gaeta is about to perjure himself to get Baltar convicted. He's here to find out what to expect from Gaeta. Gaeta is very determined to get Baltar killed, and Romo is a very good observer.
There was one thing that kept bugging me for a long time when I translated the fic. There was a metaphor. About puzzles. It went like so:
English:
He’s been able to glean a lot about Lieutenant Gaeta’s personality from all these sources, but in Romo’s mind, the picture doesn’t add up. What he’s done, the choices he made. There are missing pieces.
And if there’s one thing an attorney hates on the witness stand, it’s missing pieces. Unless of course, those pieces are missing because he stole them in the first place.
Romo suddenly wonders what he’ll steal from Gaeta. He loves these moments before the grab, when he’s inspecting a person from behind his dark ovals, sifting through the hardly-considered debris people carry around with them every day, looking for that ounce of symbolic gold, the item that will tell him what he needs to know.
[...]
An angry, disgusted snort is Gaeta’s only reply. Romo blinks at it, nonplussed. The lieutenant doesn’t know it yet, but he may have won. Certainly, Romo knows, this interview is over and the puzzle is complete. He now fully understands what Mister Gaeta might do in that courtroom, is capable of doing, and he’s not sure he can stop it. In fact, there is only one thing he can do.
The way I figure it (and I'm totally making this up. I might be off the mark?), the image of a puzzle being solved is a fairly common one in English. You've got words such as "puzzled" after all. In German, it isn't. Instead of talking of puzzles to be solved, we would be talking of riddles to be solved ("Rätsel lösen", "rätselhaft", "ein Rätsel sein" etc). That's slightly different because - no such a thing as pieces of a riddle that Romo could steal. Also, I wouldn't want to imply that Gaeta is a mystery to Romo because he isn't. That kept bugging me for a while. I decided to keep the puzzle metaphor although it's a rather far-fetched metaphor in German. At first, I didn't use the puzzles in all places millari used them, thinking I had to tone it down a little bit since it sounded much more striking now. Strangely, when I edited the text another time, I put them back in and they worked fine. I've got no clue why it sounded strange the first time around. Maybe I just didn't use the right words, I don't know.
German:
So oder so hat Romo einen Eindruck von Mr. Gaeta erhalten, doch seinem Geschmack nach verbleiben noch zu viele offene Fragen -- Gaetas Entscheidungen, seine Motive... all diese Puzzleteile fehlen noch.
Und wenn ein Anwalt eins hasst, sind es fehlende Puzzleteile; es sei denn, er hat sie selbst gestohlen.
Mit einem Mal fragt Romo sich, was er Gaeta heute stehlen wird. Er liebt diesen Moment der Erwartung vor der Tat -- wenn er sein Opfer durch getönte Sonnenbrillengläser mustert und nach einem kleinen Stückchen Gold Ausschau hält. Eine kleine, unscheinbare Information kann bereits alles sein, was er über einen Menschen wissen muss, um einen Fall zu gewinnen.
[...]
Gaetas einzige Antwort ist ein angewidertes, zutiefst verbittertes Schnauben, und Romo fällt überrascht in seinen Stuhl zurück. Der Lieutenant weiß es noch nicht, aber er mag die Verhandlung gerade für sich entschieden haben. Dieses Interview ist jedenfalls vorbei, denn Romos Puzzle ist fertig. Er hat jetzt einen ganz klaren Eindruck davon, was Gaeta in der Verhandlung machen könnte - wozu er bereit ist - und Romo bezweifelt, dass er ihn aufhalten kann.
(I changed the punctuation in places to end up with a similar flow of words but that's a rather common thing to do, I imagine. In English, short and pointed sentences are pretty. In German, long-winded and complex clauses are pretty (when a German major wants to say 'short and pointed pretty clause,' they call it a "Sentenz" :)).
You know the problem when you write about two guys and you end up with confusing multiple uses of "he"? We don't have that problem so much because we have grammatical genders. "He" can refer to things, too. If you have a line like He pats Gaeta on the shoulder, and the man flushes a bit, flinches away at the contact, it becomes something like: He pats Gaeta on the she-shoulder, and the he-man flushes a bit, flinches away at the he-contact. Hee. So, pronouns can refer to multiple things that were mentioned before. Also, words for people don't need to have the grammatical gender that goes with the biological gender of the person. Sharon would be a he-lieutenant; Hera would be an it-girl (heh). We try to work our way around those but theoretically, you could have to refer to Sharon as "he". Consequently, you never get a long row of "he... he... he..." in the first place because you have to repeat the nouns a lot more. As you might imagine, always saying "Romo" and "Gaeta" would be a bit boring, so we use descriptive phrases. "The other man" and "the younger man" would be common ones. Ranks and job descriptions would be, too.
millari told me recently that she likes using forms of address to characterize relationships. It shows (to answer your question, I think clearly it does :)). For example, Romo takes note of the fact that Gaeta still uses Baltar's honorific when talking about him, although he claims he hates Baltar. So I thought it would be interesting to draw on that when using those descriptive phrases. There's a fair amount of distance between Romo and Gaeta, so my preferred ways of referring to Gaeta were "the lieutenant" and "the officer." Since we're in Romo's point of view, Romo remains "Romo" most of the time. I hoped to impress this way that Romo is talking to a stranger who lives in a strange world that Romo, being a civvie, only knows from the outside.
As I said above, it's a story about observation of details and subtle impressions. It wasn't always easy to find a translation that both was true to the original meaning and came across as sounding natural. One of my roommates gave me a rather funny look when he walked in on me muttering variations to myself, trying to figure out which would be the more common one. ;)
Here are a couple of random lines:
English:
“I don’t know why you’d want to talk to me,” Gaeta begins - terse, defensive. “I don’t understand why I’m here.”
German:
„Ich weiß nicht einmal, was Sie von mir wollen“, sagt Gaeta kurzangebunden und defensiv. „Was soll ich überhaupt hier?“
(German Gaeta asks Romo why he's here instead of stating that he doesn't get it. I find this amusing because, since I didn't change anything else about that, it means that Romo blatantly ignores the question. He totally would. Especially since he's German now! We have a different understanding of politeness (it consists of us not being polite). On another note, German adverbs don't have that "-ly" thing going, so you don't have to avoid them. One of the first things I had to learn about writing in English was how to write without adverbs!)
English:
“You were there on New Caprica,” he said. “You saw them together repeatedly. How would you characterize their relationship?”
Gaeta’s jaw sets slightly, pupils become pinpricks. “Frakked up, if you want to know the truth.”
Behind his glasses, Romo’s eyes widen slightly. “Go on.”
German:
„Sie waren ja während der Besetzung auch auf New Caprica“, fährt Romo brüsk fort. „Sie haben meinen Klienten und die Sechs miteinander gesehen. Wie würden Sie ihre Beziehung beschreiben?“
Gaeta sieht scharf zu ihm auf. „Gestört, wenn Sie mich fragen.“ Er versteift den Unterkiefer.
Romos Sonnenbrille verbirgt das hochinteressierte Funkeln in seinen Augen. „Wie das?“
(There's neither "frakked up" nor "fucked up" in German. I had to re-evaluate their (Baltar and Six') relationship. German Gaeta thinks their relationship is "deranged." It's a rather ugly assessment. Since German eyes only ever widen from shock, Romo's eyes sparkle from interest. I also rearranged the line in the middle since I found that it sounded snappier this way. I just noticed that this changes the meaning a little bit, doesn’t it? German Gaeta gives Romo a sharp look, calls the relationship deranged, then sets his jaw. And if you were wondering about that additional "brüsk," it means "brusquely". Just thought it sounded better this way, no special kind of reasoning attached.)
English:
“That’s interesting.” Gaeta’s tension tries to pass itself off as annoyance. “Are we going to get to my deposition now?”
German:
„Faszinierend.“ Gaeta versucht sichtlich, seine Anspannung mit Sarkasmus zu verdecken. „Mir wurde gesagt, Sie seien wegen meiner Aussage hier.“
(This one turned out to grow into something rather different in German. I just couldn't make it work more literally. German Gaeta uses sarcasm to cover up his tension. Then he says "I was told you're here for my deposition," which I like, for it re-emphasizes on the fact that Gaeta is here only because he was ordered to come)
Also, millari's fic is one out of three fics where I ended up inserting an additional line break in the last paragraph, so to emphasize on the punch line. I'm wondering now whether or not that's a matter of taste. Maybe it has something to do with English being more pointed than German, so you don't have to "make" it more pointed? Huh. It goes like this:
English:
Romo knows what he’s going to take from him. He hasn’t seen it yet, but it has to be on him somewhere. He’s sure Gaeta carries it everywhere he goes as a reminder, a talisman, to make sure he doesn’t ever forget the need to hate Gaius Baltar.
German:
Genau genommen hat er nur eine Wahl, denn Romo weiß, was er Felix Gaeta stehlen muss. Noch hat er es nicht gesehen, aber der Lieutenant trägt es mit Sicherheit bei sich. Er ist sich sicher, dass Gaeta es überallhin mitnimmt, was auch immer es ist. Als Erinnerung - als Talisman.
Damit er niemals vergisst, dass er Gaius Baltar hasst.
(the need to hate Baltar became hate for Baltar. It has to be a short line to be a striking line. The original ending is a bit more subtle in meaning but I think the same message still comes across in German.
Anyway, I'm sure now. It's a language thing. If you want German to be pointed, you have to beat it into shape with a baseball bat. German stories are all bla...bla...bla... oh look, a point, there, in the back! English fic is the other way around. And I'm positive that there is some very strange but fitting comparison I could draw to the various ways of finishing up sex, but it just won't come to me. Damn. ;) Let's say that German is like cattle, chewing grass all day, while English is like a frog, jumping about happily. :D)
Comments, suggestions, complaints? :)
millari says it's okay if I say it was a bitch to translate. So, yeah, it was a bit of a bitch to translate. :D But it doesn't beat "Stakes." "Stakes" was harder. "Hostile Witness" was made up of moments where I was unsure about nuances. It's a story full of subtle observations, so there were a lot of those.
Let's start with the title. I tried for a literal translation first but found that I didn't like any variation I could come up with. The translation would have very different connotations from the original since "hostile" can both mean "feindlich" and "feindselig" -- the former implying that the witness is an enemy in war, the latter implying that the witness just doesn't want to cooperate. That's two very different things. Anyway, I'd have to add an article anyway ("The hostile witness" / "Der feindselige Zeuge"), which makes the title sound like it's been taken from a children's book. Long story short, I went with "Zeuge der Anklage" ("Witness of the accusation"), since I like titles to be matter-of-fact.
For those of you who don't know (i.e. mondenengel ;)): "Hostile Witness" is about the lawyer Romo Lampkin defending Gaius Baltar, who has been accused of having been a bad president, selling out his people and thinking with his penis instead of his brains (basically ;)). So Romo talks to Felix Gaeta who is scheduled to testify against Baltar. Contrary to the audience, Romo doesn't know that Gaeta is about to perjure himself to get Baltar convicted. He's here to find out what to expect from Gaeta. Gaeta is very determined to get Baltar killed, and Romo is a very good observer.
There was one thing that kept bugging me for a long time when I translated the fic. There was a metaphor. About puzzles. It went like so:
English:
He’s been able to glean a lot about Lieutenant Gaeta’s personality from all these sources, but in Romo’s mind, the picture doesn’t add up. What he’s done, the choices he made. There are missing pieces.
And if there’s one thing an attorney hates on the witness stand, it’s missing pieces. Unless of course, those pieces are missing because he stole them in the first place.
Romo suddenly wonders what he’ll steal from Gaeta. He loves these moments before the grab, when he’s inspecting a person from behind his dark ovals, sifting through the hardly-considered debris people carry around with them every day, looking for that ounce of symbolic gold, the item that will tell him what he needs to know.
[...]
An angry, disgusted snort is Gaeta’s only reply. Romo blinks at it, nonplussed. The lieutenant doesn’t know it yet, but he may have won. Certainly, Romo knows, this interview is over and the puzzle is complete. He now fully understands what Mister Gaeta might do in that courtroom, is capable of doing, and he’s not sure he can stop it. In fact, there is only one thing he can do.
The way I figure it (and I'm totally making this up. I might be off the mark?), the image of a puzzle being solved is a fairly common one in English. You've got words such as "puzzled" after all. In German, it isn't. Instead of talking of puzzles to be solved, we would be talking of riddles to be solved ("Rätsel lösen", "rätselhaft", "ein Rätsel sein" etc). That's slightly different because - no such a thing as pieces of a riddle that Romo could steal. Also, I wouldn't want to imply that Gaeta is a mystery to Romo because he isn't. That kept bugging me for a while. I decided to keep the puzzle metaphor although it's a rather far-fetched metaphor in German. At first, I didn't use the puzzles in all places millari used them, thinking I had to tone it down a little bit since it sounded much more striking now. Strangely, when I edited the text another time, I put them back in and they worked fine. I've got no clue why it sounded strange the first time around. Maybe I just didn't use the right words, I don't know.
German:
So oder so hat Romo einen Eindruck von Mr. Gaeta erhalten, doch seinem Geschmack nach verbleiben noch zu viele offene Fragen -- Gaetas Entscheidungen, seine Motive... all diese Puzzleteile fehlen noch.
Und wenn ein Anwalt eins hasst, sind es fehlende Puzzleteile; es sei denn, er hat sie selbst gestohlen.
Mit einem Mal fragt Romo sich, was er Gaeta heute stehlen wird. Er liebt diesen Moment der Erwartung vor der Tat -- wenn er sein Opfer durch getönte Sonnenbrillengläser mustert und nach einem kleinen Stückchen Gold Ausschau hält. Eine kleine, unscheinbare Information kann bereits alles sein, was er über einen Menschen wissen muss, um einen Fall zu gewinnen.
[...]
Gaetas einzige Antwort ist ein angewidertes, zutiefst verbittertes Schnauben, und Romo fällt überrascht in seinen Stuhl zurück. Der Lieutenant weiß es noch nicht, aber er mag die Verhandlung gerade für sich entschieden haben. Dieses Interview ist jedenfalls vorbei, denn Romos Puzzle ist fertig. Er hat jetzt einen ganz klaren Eindruck davon, was Gaeta in der Verhandlung machen könnte - wozu er bereit ist - und Romo bezweifelt, dass er ihn aufhalten kann.
(I changed the punctuation in places to end up with a similar flow of words but that's a rather common thing to do, I imagine. In English, short and pointed sentences are pretty. In German, long-winded and complex clauses are pretty (when a German major wants to say 'short and pointed pretty clause,' they call it a "Sentenz" :)).
You know the problem when you write about two guys and you end up with confusing multiple uses of "he"? We don't have that problem so much because we have grammatical genders. "He" can refer to things, too. If you have a line like He pats Gaeta on the shoulder, and the man flushes a bit, flinches away at the contact, it becomes something like: He pats Gaeta on the she-shoulder, and the he-man flushes a bit, flinches away at the he-contact. Hee. So, pronouns can refer to multiple things that were mentioned before. Also, words for people don't need to have the grammatical gender that goes with the biological gender of the person. Sharon would be a he-lieutenant; Hera would be an it-girl (heh). We try to work our way around those but theoretically, you could have to refer to Sharon as "he". Consequently, you never get a long row of "he... he... he..." in the first place because you have to repeat the nouns a lot more. As you might imagine, always saying "Romo" and "Gaeta" would be a bit boring, so we use descriptive phrases. "The other man" and "the younger man" would be common ones. Ranks and job descriptions would be, too.
millari told me recently that she likes using forms of address to characterize relationships. It shows (to answer your question, I think clearly it does :)). For example, Romo takes note of the fact that Gaeta still uses Baltar's honorific when talking about him, although he claims he hates Baltar. So I thought it would be interesting to draw on that when using those descriptive phrases. There's a fair amount of distance between Romo and Gaeta, so my preferred ways of referring to Gaeta were "the lieutenant" and "the officer." Since we're in Romo's point of view, Romo remains "Romo" most of the time. I hoped to impress this way that Romo is talking to a stranger who lives in a strange world that Romo, being a civvie, only knows from the outside.
As I said above, it's a story about observation of details and subtle impressions. It wasn't always easy to find a translation that both was true to the original meaning and came across as sounding natural. One of my roommates gave me a rather funny look when he walked in on me muttering variations to myself, trying to figure out which would be the more common one. ;)
Here are a couple of random lines:
English:
“I don’t know why you’d want to talk to me,” Gaeta begins - terse, defensive. “I don’t understand why I’m here.”
German:
„Ich weiß nicht einmal, was Sie von mir wollen“, sagt Gaeta kurzangebunden und defensiv. „Was soll ich überhaupt hier?“
(German Gaeta asks Romo why he's here instead of stating that he doesn't get it. I find this amusing because, since I didn't change anything else about that, it means that Romo blatantly ignores the question. He totally would. Especially since he's German now! We have a different understanding of politeness (it consists of us not being polite). On another note, German adverbs don't have that "-ly" thing going, so you don't have to avoid them. One of the first things I had to learn about writing in English was how to write without adverbs!)
English:
“You were there on New Caprica,” he said. “You saw them together repeatedly. How would you characterize their relationship?”
Gaeta’s jaw sets slightly, pupils become pinpricks. “Frakked up, if you want to know the truth.”
Behind his glasses, Romo’s eyes widen slightly. “Go on.”
German:
„Sie waren ja während der Besetzung auch auf New Caprica“, fährt Romo brüsk fort. „Sie haben meinen Klienten und die Sechs miteinander gesehen. Wie würden Sie ihre Beziehung beschreiben?“
Gaeta sieht scharf zu ihm auf. „Gestört, wenn Sie mich fragen.“ Er versteift den Unterkiefer.
Romos Sonnenbrille verbirgt das hochinteressierte Funkeln in seinen Augen. „Wie das?“
(There's neither "frakked up" nor "fucked up" in German. I had to re-evaluate their (Baltar and Six') relationship. German Gaeta thinks their relationship is "deranged." It's a rather ugly assessment. Since German eyes only ever widen from shock, Romo's eyes sparkle from interest. I also rearranged the line in the middle since I found that it sounded snappier this way. I just noticed that this changes the meaning a little bit, doesn’t it? German Gaeta gives Romo a sharp look, calls the relationship deranged, then sets his jaw. And if you were wondering about that additional "brüsk," it means "brusquely". Just thought it sounded better this way, no special kind of reasoning attached.)
English:
“That’s interesting.” Gaeta’s tension tries to pass itself off as annoyance. “Are we going to get to my deposition now?”
German:
„Faszinierend.“ Gaeta versucht sichtlich, seine Anspannung mit Sarkasmus zu verdecken. „Mir wurde gesagt, Sie seien wegen meiner Aussage hier.“
(This one turned out to grow into something rather different in German. I just couldn't make it work more literally. German Gaeta uses sarcasm to cover up his tension. Then he says "I was told you're here for my deposition," which I like, for it re-emphasizes on the fact that Gaeta is here only because he was ordered to come)
Also, millari's fic is one out of three fics where I ended up inserting an additional line break in the last paragraph, so to emphasize on the punch line. I'm wondering now whether or not that's a matter of taste. Maybe it has something to do with English being more pointed than German, so you don't have to "make" it more pointed? Huh. It goes like this:
English:
Romo knows what he’s going to take from him. He hasn’t seen it yet, but it has to be on him somewhere. He’s sure Gaeta carries it everywhere he goes as a reminder, a talisman, to make sure he doesn’t ever forget the need to hate Gaius Baltar.
German:
Genau genommen hat er nur eine Wahl, denn Romo weiß, was er Felix Gaeta stehlen muss. Noch hat er es nicht gesehen, aber der Lieutenant trägt es mit Sicherheit bei sich. Er ist sich sicher, dass Gaeta es überallhin mitnimmt, was auch immer es ist. Als Erinnerung - als Talisman.
Damit er niemals vergisst, dass er Gaius Baltar hasst.
(the need to hate Baltar became hate for Baltar. It has to be a short line to be a striking line. The original ending is a bit more subtle in meaning but I think the same message still comes across in German.
Anyway, I'm sure now. It's a language thing. If you want German to be pointed, you have to beat it into shape with a baseball bat. German stories are all bla...bla...bla... oh look, a point, there, in the back! English fic is the other way around. And I'm positive that there is some very strange but fitting comparison I could draw to the various ways of finishing up sex, but it just won't come to me. Damn. ;) Let's say that German is like cattle, chewing grass all day, while English is like a frog, jumping about happily. :D)
Comments, suggestions, complaints? :)