In this essay I plan to compare two translations of the popular French novel, “Le Petit Prince”, and discuss how time has changed the way it has been translated. The original translation of the novel was written in 1943 by Katherine Wood, however since it has been a long time since it was published, I wish to compare it to a modern version and analyse how the translation has changed. The second translation I will use is Richard Howard’s 2000 version which is considered “the new English standard” (Matt Kim, 2016), and uses a more colloquial style to the original.
Le Petit Prince, written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was first published in 1943 in French. Many of the initial reviews were confused by the style of the book: its multi-layered story, and morals, and it is often considered beyond the scope of children’s literature because of its philosophical musings.
A review by Beatrice Sherman from the New York Times calls The Little Prince “a parable for grown people in the guise of a simple story for children”, because of its simple story and charm, but also its use of complex language and meaning.
The book had initial success, as it ended up on the New York Times Bestseller list for 2 weeks, however to this day, it is among the top 4 most translated novels in the world.
Katherine Wood created the first translation of the novel in the same year, 1943, and was the only translation available for several decades, meaning that many people were familiar with only her version of the text. Readers enjoyed the translation that Wood created because “the translation that she produced was very similar to Saint-Exupéry’s story, as [it] maintains Saint-Exupéry's story-telling spirit and charm, if not its literal accuracy.” (Nick Long, 2012). As she lived at the same time as Saint-Exupéry, she was easily able to capture its lyrical spirit.
The translation hasn’t come without its criticisms though; “It was felt by some later English-language publishers that Katherine Woods's original 1943 translation of The Little Prince was too stiff.” (Editor Eric, 2004), and some of the vocabulary used was too complex for an average reader to understand.
Richard Howard’s translation was published in 2000 to celebrate 100 years of Saint-Exupéry’s birth, and although it was not the next translation to be published, in his translators note, Howard refers to his translation as the second. Since Wood’s translation is no longer published, Howard’s is found to be the most commonly used.
Howard’s translation is very different, and most people who had grown up with Wood’s translation disliked the changes and felt that the “charm” The Little Prince had had been lost. It is a lot more colloquial; He uses contractions, where appropriate, he drops every unnecessary "that", and he modernises punctuation and paragraphing. The meandering lyricism that Wood and Saint-Exupéry had in their texts was gone, as Howard streamlined it to straightforward English in an attempt to retrieve Saint-Exupéry’s simplistic aesthetic.
In this section, I will use Vinay and Darbelnet’s model to break down passages and outline some of the procedures used, showing how the two are different. Then I can decide which translation best captures the ST.
The first passage is taken from Chapter one, and contains examples of V&D’s translation procedures.
In the second line of the passage, there is a title translation of a book the child has read. The French reads, “une livre sur la forêt vierge qui s’appelait Histoires vécues” yet both translators translated the passage very differently.
Here, there has been a complete sentence structure change and an example of amplification: this is when “the TL uses more words because of syntactic expansion” (Munday 2012). Katherine Wood has brought the title of the book to the start of the phrase, and added extra comma’s. She has likely done this because the title is the most important part of the phrase. She also expanded the title, by adding ‘from Nature’ in order to make it more specific and avoid confusion about the stories. Otherwise, her translation was very literal; she translated the words “forêt vierge”, to ‘primeval forest’ even though an average reader might not know what primeval means.
On the other hand, Richard Howard has kept the sentence structure the same, and was also very literal, yet he translated “forêt vierge” differently; he decided to change the meaning to jungle. This is an example of modulation: when the translation “changes the semantics and point of view of the SL” (Munday 2012).
Jungle circumstantially fits better for a few reasons: it gives the title a wild feel and is very similar to a primeval forest anyway, and also many children would struggle with understanding the vocabulary. However he has lost some of the original meaning from the title that Katherine Wood’s keeps.
In the last paragraph of the passage, the child receives his inspiration for his Drawing Number One. The French original is, “J’ai alors beaucoup réfléchi sur les aventures de la jungle et, à mon tour, j’ai réussi, avec un crayon de couleur, à tracer mon premier dessin”, and again, both translators came up with something very different.
Here, there is sentence structure change, and équivalence. “Vinay and Darbelnet use this term to refer to cases where languages describe the same situation by different stylistic or structural means” (Munday 2012). In other words, when a translation replicates the same situation as in the original, whilst using completely different wording.
This is visible from the first line where Katherine Wood translates “J’ai alors beaucoup réfléchi” to, “I pondered deeply”. To ponder is a more obscure translation of réfléchir; one might first think of to think or to reflect. The word deeply does not even have a French equivalent in the text as beaucoup is not its counterpart.
There is another example of modulation in KW’s translation: in the third line, “J’ai réussi…à tracer” has been translated as, ‘I succeeded in making’. Here, Wood has decided to use a gerund instead of the infinitive of the verb ‘to draw’.
In Richard Howard’s translation, he has used amplification, by adding “in those days” to the start of the sentence, which is not found in the French; he included it to give a sense of time passing. He also uses contraction for the phrase “aventures de la jungle”, to change it simply to ‘jungle adventures’. While not producing a literal translation, jungle adventures is an easier, simpler translation to read. Finally, he changes the sentence structure, placing, ‘using a coloured pencil’ at the end, when it should be before ‘my first drawings’. This is likely done because the drawings are the more important part in context, as they are the focus of the remainder of the chapter.
We can also use Nida’s idea of formal and dynamic equivalence, alongside Vinay and Darbelnet’s model, in order to establish which of the two translations best captures the source text.
“Formal equivalence focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content1.” (Venuti 2000)
Dynamic equivalence is the "quality of a translation in which the message of the original text has been so transported into the receptor language that the response of the receptor is essentially like that of the original receptors.” (Nida and Taber, 1969)
It can be said that Katherine Wood has created a translation of formal equivalence; her translation focuses on both the form and the content, as she largely keeps the sentence structure the same, and translates the words very literally. Her translation also managed to keep the same lyrical spirit as the original French. According to V&D’s model, these are also characteristics of direct translation.
Richard Howard’s can be described as dynamic equivalence because he does not translate literally. He changed sentence structure, and uses simpler vocabulary and grammar to create a colloquial tone, yet he still keeps the message of the ST. His translation uses certain procedures linked to oblique translation which, according to V&D, must only be produced when a literal translation is unacceptable. Richard Howard probably avoided a literal translation because even though there is a corresponding equivalent, it is not within the same register (Venuti 2000)
There is no better form of equivalence, as formal equivalence is more of a goal than reality, mainly because one language may contain a word or concept that has no equivalent in the other.
Vinay and Darbelnet have stated that they believe the best translations, are those which are the most literal. This would render Katherine Wood’s translation the better of the two in their eyes, however, given the time and culture difference between the two, and the target audience is primarily children, there is an argument to be made for Richard Howard. His translation is easier to understand in terms of the vocabulary used, and fits better in today’s literary polysystem.
In the Dictionary of Translation Studies, polysystem theory is defined as “a theory to account for the behavior and evolution of literary system.” “A nation has not only its own language, but also its own culture, which came into being under the certain natural environment, historical conditions and social reality. The common culture gave birth to the common language.” (Chen Yan, 2014) From this quote we can therefore deduce that as culture changes over time, so does language.
An example of polysystem theory can be drawn from the translation of “matters of consequences”, which is also linked to Venuti’s theory of domestication and foreignisation, as
mentioned by Yu-Yun Hseih. These theories tie in together because of how each translators approach differs over time and social contexts.
The discourse first arose from Wood’s translation in Chapter 7. When the little prince tries to have a conversation with the man repairing his plane engine, he interrupts the child, saying, “Je m’occupe, moi, des choses sérieuses!”.
Wood translated this to, “I am very busy with matters of consequence!” In Howard’s version, this sentence becomes, “I’m busy here with something serious!” retaining the literal meaning.
Woods purposefully changed Saint-Exupéry’s “serious things” into “matters of consequence” in her translation.
Replacing “serious things” with “matters of consequence” in 1943 was serious, since at the time, non-literal translation did not happen, and the change was considered to be for moral reasons, rather than aesthetic.
Translation and publication of The Little Prince was urgent to fulfil a specific task; the war was still going on, so the dreamy, light-hearted novella was necessary not only to console children, but also to heal adults.
Matters of consequence indicated responsibilities, referring to the cause and effect of one’s behaviour. However seriousness is a relative concept, and its definition should come from its antonym, lightness. Woods’s decision shows her moralistic interpretation of the text, her response to the era, and, therefore, we can assume “matters of consequence” is her metaphor for war.
Howard chose to retrieve the author’s simplistic language and tone without imposing his interpretation onto the book by keeping “something serious”, which isn’t a literal translation itself.
This difference in translation is down to the evolution of the literary system. When Katherine Wood’s translation was first published, the literal translation and attention to detail of the book’s tone is what caused so many people to fall in love with her translation. However, over time, as children’s literature started to take a larger place in the system, the translation changed, to a text that was easier to understand and engage with, whilst still keeping the original meaning of the French. Culture was recognised as an important part of translation, and as a result, translators started taking this into account, moving further from word-for-word translation, towards free translation. This is known as Domestication. According to Lawrence Venuti, every translator should look at the translation process through the prism of culture which refracts the source language cultural norms and it is the translator’s task to convey them, preserving their meaning and their foreignness, to the target-language text (Venuti 1998).
Therefore, what Richard Howard has produced is not an inaccurate or bad translation, it is merely the product of a translation shift, and the norm in modern translation.
To say that translated literature maintains a central position in the literary polysystem means that it participates actively in shaping the center of the polysystem. In such a situation it is by and large an integral part of innovatory forces, and as such likely to be identified with major events in literary history while these are taking place. This implies that in this situation no clear-cut distinction is maintained between “original” and “translated” writings.
Both translations are correct and accurate, however it is unfair to pick a better one, because of the different parts they play in the polysystem. Each was meant to fulfill a different purpose: Wood created a translation that was both literal and kept the lyricism and tone of the text, and Howard created a text that was more accessible and understandable to children.