Never Let me Go Book

Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” is a science-fiction novel by a Japanese-born British writer. It delves into the life of a girl named Kathy H. and her relationships with two classmates: Ruth and Tommy. It’s always a challenge to discern where Ishiguro’s true subject lies. The psychological circumstances in his stories are spelled out in precise, sometimes comically tedious detail, and the emphasis is primarily on the storyteller’s struggles to achieve clarity and satisfaction in an uncooperative world.

The story is divided into three sections, chronicling the stages of the main characters’ lives. I translated the first two stages. I chose this novel for three reasons: it is a type of novel that allows me to use significant and vivid words; it has an appealing title; and the author’s nationality also plays a role. Consequently, I anticipated that he would use simple words, sensible expressions, and straightforward structure. However, when I began translating, I discovered the exact opposite.

According to Newmark, “the act of translation is transferring the meaning of a text from one language to another, taking care mostly of the functionally relevant meaning.” As Hassan (2011, 1) puts it, “A lot of changes were applied to capture the deep meaning underlying surface choices.”

In translating the novel, I strived to focus on the meaning and to transfer it clearly to the target language (TL). Nonetheless, I also aimed to preserve the original tone and viewpoint to the best of my ability. In my view, two factors dictated the approach. The first one is that the text needs to appear natural and fluid because it’s narrative, and the readers should experience this simplicity of personal narration, which is challenging to achieve using the literal approach.

Throughout the process of translating this novel, I faced several structural obstacles that I had to overcome to retain the fluidity of the original narrative style. One of the main challenges was selecting the appropriate word, not the direct one, but the right one. To resolve such issues, I used translational strategies, which are the translator’s primary tools to produce an accurate and fluent TT. Loescher (1991, 8) defines translation strategy as “a potentially conscious procedure for resolving a problem faced in translating a text, or any segment of it.” For instance, the word “Carer”; I initially translated it into “a,” but after studying the context, I realised that the word “a/c” is the best equivalent in this case, even though it may give readers a spiritual impression at first, but they will grasp the correct meaning when they read the second phase. I also translated “thunderous bellowing” and “whether we approved or not,” considering this to be the author’s intent behind these sentences. They also convey the author’s tone better to the TL readers.

In English, short sentences are generally used, unlike in Arabic. This presented a problem when translating the text. The approach implemented to address this issue is sentence combination. Additionally, a considerable amount of stylistic, structural, and order changes have been made to provide the same result in the target text. For instance, “I remember it taking a bit of nerve on my part,” is translated as “????????????” In conclusion, various other modifications were carried out to accommodate the absence of structural equivalents or to fulfill the need to preserve the original meaning and tone in the primary text. The translational strategies of omission or addition of words, word-order transfer, and verbalization are among the techniques I utilized to surmount some of the aforementioned challenges. In confronting these obstacles, I realized the importance for the translator to not only convey the message but also interpret the original author’s intentions before proceeding with the translation.

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