Translating an Idiom in a Short Story
You are translating a short passage of Bengali fiction into English for a class anthology. The passage reads: "রহিম মাথায় হাত দিয়ে বসে রইল। তার চোখের পানি শুকিয়ে গেছে, কিন্তু বুকটা পাথর হয়ে গেছে।" A draft translation reads: "Rahim sat with his hand on his head. His tears had dried up, but his chest had become a stone." Your teacher says the translation is word-for-word accurate but reads strangely in English and misses the emotional force of the Bengali. She asks you to revise the translation and explain the decisions, particularly around idioms and figurative language.
1. Revise the translation of the two sentences and explain how you handled each figurative expression.
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Revised translation: "Rahim sat with his head in his hands. His tears had dried up, but his heart had turned to stone."
Decisions:
- "মাথায় হাত দিয়ে বসে রইল" is an idiom of grief or despair. A literal "with his hand on his head" is not idiomatic in English. The natural English equivalent is "with his head in his hands", which conveys the same posture and emotion. I chose an equivalent idiom rather than a literal gloss.
- "চোখের পানি শুকিয়ে গেছে" is a conventional Bengali expression for tears drying. "His tears had dried up" works naturally in English and preserves the sense of exhausted grief.
- "বুকটা পাথর হয়ে গেছে" literally is "his chest has become stone". In Bengali, বুক (chest) is the seat of feeling, and stone signals numbness or hardness of heart. English uses "heart" rather than "chest" for the seat of emotion, so "his heart had turned to stone" preserves the metaphor while being idiomatic.
The principle: translate the function and feeling of figurative language, not its surface words, while preserving the image where English allows it.
2. A classmate argues that any change from the literal wording is a mistranslation. How would you respond, using one of the expressions as an example?
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I would distinguish literal accuracy from translational equivalence. A translation is successful when it produces in the target reader a response equivalent to that of the source reader, not when it matches the source word for word.
Take "মাথায় হাত দিয়ে বসে রইল". Rendered literally as "sat with his hand on his head", an English reader may picture a casual gesture or even confusion, not grief. The Bengali reader immediately recognises despair. So the literal version is actually less faithful to meaning because it misleads the target reader.
Substituting "with his head in his hands" preserves the emotional signal. Nothing is added that is not in the source; the same posture of grief is conveyed through the idiom English speakers use for it. This is equivalence at the level of meaning and effect, which is the goal of literary translation. Word-for-word rendering is a technique, not a standard of correctness.