Deciding How to Render an Idiom in Translation
For Unit 4 you are translating a short contemporary Armenian story into English. One paragraph contains an idiomatic expression in which a character 'eats another person's salt,' used to describe someone who has accepted hospitality and therefore owes loyalty. A literal English rendering ('he ate his salt') is meaningless to English readers. An English near-equivalent ('he has broken bread with him') conveys shared hospitality but not the debt of loyalty that the Armenian phrase implies. A third option is to translate the sense directly: 'he had accepted his hospitality and now owed him loyalty.' The paragraph also depends on the phrase for irony later, when the same character betrays the host. Your teacher requires that the translation read naturally in English and that the irony still land. You must choose an approach and defend it, and you must also decide whether to add a translator's note.
1. Compare the three options and recommend one, explaining the trade-off each makes between naturalness and fidelity.
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Each option trades one value for another.
Literal ('he ate his salt'). Maximum formal fidelity, zero naturalness. English readers will read it as a strange physical action, and the later betrayal will lose its cause because the debt was never established. Reject.
Near-equivalent ('broken bread with him'). High naturalness and it preserves the hospitality image, but it under-specifies the obligation. English readers hear 'they shared a meal,' which is companionship, not debt. The irony would then look like betrayal of friendship rather than betrayal of a sworn obligation - weaker, though not absent.
Sense translation ('accepted his hospitality and now owed him loyalty'). Slightly less vivid as an image, but it preserves the exact relationship the plot depends on: hospitality creates debt, and the debt is what gets betrayed. It reads naturally as English prose.
Recommendation: sense translation, because the phrase is load-bearing for the plot. Fidelity here means preserving the causal chain, not the metaphor's surface. Where an idiom's image and its function cannot both survive, function wins.
2. Should you add a translator's note? Justify your decision with reference to the reader's experience of the story.
Read the worked answer
Yes, but a minimal one, and placed so it does not interrupt the narrative.
Reasons for a note:
- The phrase is culturally specific. A reader who does not know that hospitality in this context creates obligation may read the sense translation as merely explanatory and miss that it is a recognised social bond, not a private favour.
- The irony depends on the reader feeling the weight of the debt. A one-line note at the end of the story can confirm what the text has already shown without pre-empting it.
Reasons to keep it minimal:
- A note inside the paragraph would break the fictional spell and turn the story into an annotated document.
- The sense translation already carries the meaning; the note adds cultural depth, not basic comprehension. Over-annotation patronises the reader.
So the decision is: translate the sense in the text, and add a short endnote explaining the hospitality-and-loyalty custom. The test is whether the story works without the note - it does - and whether the note deepens it - it does. A note that is required for comprehension would signal a failed translation; a note that enriches after the fact is good practice.