'Bottom, thou art translated.'

[Lalaith]

Well, they kind of do, because both were terms formerly used by colonists of that country, to refer to indigenous populations. I don't think "native" used in this sense is particularly PC, in fact to refer to people as "natives" is rather offensive although I agree, not as offensive as Skraelingar.
I think the Vikings did use this somewhat dismissively and insultingly, because they found the wearing of skins barbaric. In terms of just how insulting, I suppose it would be on a par with calling native Americans, "Redskins".

What was the name of the Vinland translator btw?

As for Bilbo saying "Good heavens" in Russian, I personally wouldn't have thought about the religious significance until it was pointed out, it's not like saying "Good God" to my mind. Also I'm sure that in the Hobbit he does say "Bless me" which also has religious connotations does it not?

If you like, I'll check the Icelandic translations of Tolkien to see if I find anything interesting.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Lalaith

As for Bilbo saying "Good heavens" in Russian, I personally wouldn't have thought about the religious significance until it was pointed out, it's not like saying "Good God" to my mind. Also I'm sure that in the Hobbit he does say "Bless me" which also has religious connotations does it not?

Now, that's down to my poor memory & posting while at work. The actual Russian (tr. Rakhmanova) has exclamations such as 'Dear God!', 'My God!', 'Merciful God!', 'god only knows', & 'otherwise god only knows' & has Bombur saying 'God forbid that I should criticise Thorin, may his beard grow limitlessly' (taken from the essay 'Tolkien Through Russian Eyes' by Mark T Hooker.) Note that this translation was made during the communist period, so the references to God were actually quite risky! Point being, a Russian reader would have understood the book to be to be a far more 'religious' work than an English reader of the original.

I think that translating the word as 'natives' makes the Greenlanders seem too PC. But this is another question - if you avoid using an 'offensive' term in order to spare the feelings of modern readers don't actually create a false image of the original work &, by extension, of the original settlers? Rakhmanova's translation of TH could be seen as a 'political' statement in a communist state, but how many Russian readers take TH as a 'Christian' story. Tolkien stated that he deliberately removed all references to religion in LotR, Rakhmanova has inserted religious references into TH. But has she made it a different work?

BTW, the translator of the Vinland Sagas is Keneva Kunz. The earlier Penguin translation by Magnus Magnusson (I think) retains the original Skraelings.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

I think you really do undermine the function of translation if, for whatever well-intentioned reason, you deliberately alter the author's perspective and the flavor of his words. The ideal translation is perfectly transparent- never achievable, of course, but that's the goal. The reader of the Leifssaga Erikssson wants to read the medieval text, and 'feel' the medieval Norse mind behind it- otherwise he'd just read a modern history. Surely you wouldn't want a translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to clean up all the nasty things the monks said about those same Norsemen, would you?

The early Norwegian
settlers in Greenland sought to control their natural environment in the same way that they did
in their native Norway. By not recognizing the fundamental differences between their former
environment and their new one their society eventually collapsed.

A rather obsolescent theory, I'm afraid: work with Greenland ice cores has shown that in Eric's time mean temperatures on the South Greenland coast were much warmer than today, and suitable for Scandinavian-style agriculture. It was the onset of the global cooling known as the 'Little Ice Age' that doomed the Greenland colony- although I suppose they might at that stage tried adapting to Inuit living.

[davem]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli

A rather obsolescent theory, I'm afraid: work with Greenland ice cores has shown that in Eric's time mean temperatures on the South Greenland coast were much warmer than today, and suitable for Scandinavian-style agriculture. It was the onset of the global cooling known as the 'Little Ice Age' that doomed the Greenland colony- although I suppose they might at that stage tried adapting to Inuit living.

Its unfortunate the whole approach isn't obsolete. There seems to be an attempt on the part of the author to make out the Norse settlers to be a kind of almost proto-fascist group who swept into Greenland/Vinland & attempted to impose the final solution on the natives & brought about their own Gotterdammerung by rejecting the wisdom of those 'noble savages' (the 'Vikings as bad guys' approach as typified in the recent movie 'Pathfinder') whereas the translator of the Graenlendinga Saga seems to want to erase any perceived 'racist' attitudes on behalf of the Norse settlers & present them as a combination of heroic warrior poets & peaceful traders (the 'Vikings as good guys' approach).

To me this kind of 'Hollywoodising' simplification & desire not to 'offend' anybody is a major problem. The good guys must be without fault & the bad guys without virtue - one can't imagine, for instance, a WWII movie aimed at the mass market which showed a Nazi soldier performing a selflessly heroic act or a US soldier as racist or anti-semitic (a British soldier maybe, because, as Tony Parsons put it Hollywood mainly shows the British as 'Nazis with good table manners' - but I digress...). There are stereotypes which the good guys & the bad guys are expected to conform to - when the good guys are good they must be very, very good, but when the bad guys are bad they must be horrid.

EDIT

Of course, the other problem with translation is when the translator uses modern idiom to make a work like LotR more 'accessible'. I've noticed this a few times with these recent translations of the Sagas. phrases like 'Now that I see you're in good shape', or 'The lights (in the hall) went out' & 'When the lights came back on' simply don't work as they put us too much in mind of contemporary neovels, & , in the second instance, of electric lights being switched off & back on. Brian Rosebury commented on the speech patterns of the Orcs in LotR & how Tolkien took care not to make them sound like contemporary gangsters. The language a translator of the Sagas employs must not simply reflect contemporary usage 'because the originals used everyday speech - they must use a language which reflects that these events took place many centuries ago (or in the case of LotR many millennia ago) & so pharaseology which puts us in mind of contemporary drama or electrical appliances is simply out of place.

[Lalaith]

Oh, here´s an interesting translation nugget I found out today, davem...apparently some saga/edda translator made a cock-up at some time in the 18th century which meant that for ages, people thought that Vikings drank out of human skulls, rather than horns.

[Formendacil]

As a bit of an aside... regarding the changing meaning of words from the time of composition to the present, we can already see some of that in the Lord of the Rings. As already pointed out, the use of "swarthy" and other terms denoting dark pigmentation relating to some of the enemies of the West is held as evidence of racism in Tolkien's work, though it not necessarily proof of such. On perhaps a more dramatic level, references of being "gay and merry" amongst Hobbits might well confuse a younger reader only familiar with homosexual gays--and might help explain the reams of related fanfiction.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Formendacil

As a bit of an aside... regarding the changing meaning of words from the time of composition to the present, we can already see some of that in the Lord of the Rings. As already pointed out, the use of "swarthy" and other terms denoting dark pigmentation relating to some of the enemies of the West is held as evidence of racism in Tolkien's work, though it not necessarily proof of such. On perhaps a more dramatic level, references of being "gay and merry" amongst Hobbits might well confuse a younger reader only familiar with homosexual gays--and might help explain the reams of related fanfiction.

Makes me wonder how soon we'll need an English translation of LotR

And yet....if a translator of LotR into another language was to us 'non-racist' terminology how far would that damage the 'Light vs Darkness' imagery Tolkien spent such effort building up? Has 'gay' for instance now come to completely lose its original meaning of 'light-hearted' for a general readership for it to actually find the usage strange - do some readers actually interpret it as meaning that some characters are homosexual? And what about 'queer'? I know that in the radio adaptation of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by Brian Sibley (its actually an sramatisation of the House of Tom Bombadil/Barrow Downs episode which was missed out of the BBC radio LotR, not the poems) the word 'queer' is used once, then replaced by 'weird' - also suitably Anglo-Saxon, but not the word Tolkien used ('gay' is used in the LotR adaptation - Aragorn says of Merry in the Houses of Healing 'So strong & gay a spirit is in him'). I can't help wondering whether the reason was that the use of 'gay' & 'queer' would provoke giggles in the audience. I only note in passing that in the movie Sam in Lorien says 'silver showers' in his verse on Gandalf's fireworks rather than the original 'golden showers'.....

All of which is to ask how much the changes in language even in the original can affect the reader's perception of the tale. Of course, readers of translations have it easier in some ways than readers of the original, as new translations can be commissioned on a regular basis to avoid the changes in language that may provoke such 'awkwardnesses'.

And it also occurs to me whether any translations are considered as especially significant in themselves, so that they stay in print after a new translation appears? This occurred to me recently when looking at translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses. I noticed that Penguin have two translations currently available - a new one by David Raeburn & Arthur Golding's 1567 translation, widely considered a masterpiece of Renaissance literature in itself. And let's not forget Chapman's Homer! Both are, in a real sense, works of great literature, rather than simply being seen as 'translations' to be surpassed by more 'accurate' versions of the originals. Could there be (if there aren't such already) translations of Tolkien's works which are seen as 'equal' to the original, or are all destined to be 'second best' versions only there for readers who can't read the book in the original?