Choosing between two student translations of a messenger speech
You are co-editing the sixth-form classics journal. For the “Translation Workshop” page you have two unpublished renderings, sent by students, of the same messenger speech from a Greek tragedy: a queen has been killed offstage and the messenger reports it to the chorus. Both are 90 words long and both are accurate to the Greek at the level of sense. Version A begins “Oh no, oh no - she’s gone down, hit in the side, and the blood’s black all over the doors” and continues in flat contemporary English, adding bracketed stage directions that are not in the Greek. Version B begins “Alas, alas! Dead is the queen; struck in her side; dark blood besprent the doors” and preserves the messenger’s formal address to the chorus and the announcement formula. The journal’s editorial note says translations should “make the conventions of the genre visible rather than invisible”. The other editor argues for A: it is “more immediate, and our readers are sixteen”. You have 400 words of space and one slot.
1. Which version should run, and on what criterion? Decide as an editor, not as a reviewer.
Read the worked answer
The criterion must come from the editorial policy, or the argument is just taste against taste. The policy asks translations to make genre conventions visible. Judged by that, Version B wins on the decisive point: it keeps the messenger’s formal address to the chorus and the announcement formula. Those are not decorations. A messenger speech is a set-piece; the audience is listening to a controlled narration, not watching a naturalistic emergency, and a translation that hides this teaches the reader the wrong genre.
Version A’s “immediacy” is an imported naturalism. Flat contemporary English plus invented stage directions gives the reader a realistic scene the Greek does not supply; it is vivid, but the vividness comes from the translator’s additions, not from the source. That is not a translation decision but a rewriting decision, and it should be flagged as such if published.
But B is not automatically right either. “Besbrent”-style archaism (“besprent”) turns the passage into a glossary exercise and confuses difficulty with dignity; sixteenth-century diction is not the same thing as Greek tragic register.
Decision: run B, edited - keep the address, the announcement formula and the elevated register, replace “besprent” with plain “dark blood on the doors”, and cut or clearly bracket the invented stage directions. Publish A’s opening line alongside as a comparison, with a three-sentence note on what each translation chooses.
2. A reader writes that a translation “cannot be wrong if it gets the sense right”. Respond, using this pair of versions as your evidence.
Read the worked answer
The reader is using one criterion (semantic accuracy) for a task that has several. Getting the sense right is necessary, not sufficient. Translation is function-for-function, not word-for-word: a rendering can be semantically correct and still misrepresent what the passage is doing.
Evidence from the pair. Version A gets the sense right and still misleads, because it adds stage directions that do not exist and lowers the register into casual speech. A sixteen-year-old reading A learns that Greek tragedy is a soap opera with a body count. Version B gets the sense right and misleads differently: “besprent” is accurate in meaning and wrong in effect, because it signals “old poem” rather than “formal public narration”. Both are “correct”; neither is yet good.
What follows for practice. Ask three questions of any version: what does it say (sense), who is speaking and in what mode (register and convention), and what has the translator added or removed (intervention). A translator’s choices should be visible and defensible, not invisible and deniable.
A note for the journal: print the Greek word order in a footnote for one line, so readers can see that word-order and formula, not just vocabulary, carry meaning. That single footnote does more for the reader than either version alone.