| When
I read the April 30 edition of the “Ela”
section in the mainstream Brazilian newspaper, O
Globo, I came across the following phrase: “mulheres
modernas com saias tipo ânfora e blusas de gola
alta com estampas de poás.” I immediately
thought about how this phrase would have been written
in the original English¹ , as it referred to a
New York Times article written by fashion journalist,
Cathy Horyn.
For
three years, I worked as assistant editor of a website
specializing in fashion. One of my tasks was to translate
texts from international agencies into Portuguese. Yet
one of the biggest challenges involved in this kind
of work was to make the adjectives used by the so-called
international fashion experts understandable to Portuguese
language speakers. In English texts, it is not unusual
to describe a new collection presented at a fashion
show as “fresh,” “trendy” or
“cool.” And that’s that. Americans
and Britons appear satisfied with single-word analyses.
Brazilians, on the other hand, are not. More than a
simple adjective is required to accurately describe
something that is supposedly artistic yet certainly
commercial, such as a bikini collection.
It
is commonplace to say that those words are virtually
untranslatable. Not owing to the translator’s
incompetence, but rather because such words have implicit
meanings belonging to a semantic universe much larger
than the mere definition in a dictionary. “Fresh”
is not just fresco or novo. It is
also jovem (young), leve (light),
pra cima (up beat). “Trendy” is
not just something that follows the latest fad or fashion,
it is also what embodies a so-called modernity and therefore
has assured its own “usability” —
or should one say “wearability”? A “trendy”
person dresses and acts “trendy.” See how
difficult it is? I won’t even try to explain “cool!”
The
mathematics of the adjectives used in fashion texts
is so complex that well-humored comments are not unusual
among those in the business. One such example is the
joke where Donatella Versace tries to describe her new
collection, only with too few adjectives for such a
task.
“My
collection is totally colorful… totally young...
totally totally!!!” (Read with an Italian accent,
please!)
Due to the use of simple adjectives, the apparently
easy translation of fashion texts actually presents
a range of obstacles for the adventurous translator.
The subjectivity of many concepts that invade international
fashion publications can be a hair-raising activity
for most translators (dare to translate that sentence
into any language...) |
