🦋 Placement of a pause
To expand on a comment in the previous post, I just can't understand this choice by Pontiero: the Portuguese ...no interesse desta editora e da harmonia das nossas futuras relações, Profissionais. Espero que não lhe tenha passado... is translated as...for the sake of the publishing house and harmony in our future relationship. Professional, I trust you're not suggesting... Now I'm just really confused as to why Pontiero would have transposed the comma preceding "Profissionais" and the period after it. My initial thought when I read the English sentence was, this would "sound right" in Portuguese because the adjective follows the noun, so Raimundo is "completing the thought" of his interlocutor, whereas in English he's inserting a word in the middle of her thought. But the punctuation issue is separate. In the original, Raimundo adds his adjective directly in reply to her -- she is a little taken aback and pauses before replying. In the translation as it stands here, Raimundo pauses before replying, and she comes back with a quick riposte. I'm sort of flummoxed as to why this would be done -- it changes the sense of the passage and for no good reason that I can see.
 Thinking about this a little further: I guess it's possible that the change in punctuation is a way of addressing the word-order issue -- that the quick "professional" following "relationship" sounds right in Portuguese, but in English the longer pause is necessary because the "correction" is being inserted prior to the end of the previous sentence. This does not seem right to me -- I think the flow of conversation would still work even though there's a slightly false note introduced by the word order -- but it makes some sense as a reasoning behind this change. (And/or, another possibility is that Pontiero is having a little fun with me by getting me to proof-read a novel about proof-reading.)
posted evening of Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
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