I’m guessing that it’s easy to say – or should that be “plead”? – that believing in things like power and beauty alone does not always amount to believing in worthy art, or something similar. Myself, I’ve heard it said often enough that translation is an art… and would be among the first to agree that believing in things like accuracy and clarity alone – and I won’t try to argue that that doesn’t sound vague – does not always amount to following the path of good translation.
I look back on all the translation work I have done since I started as a professional translator in 2008, and I want to make it clear that, for all the diligence and commitment to the correct message (not to mention linguistic inventiveness) that I’ve shown in it, it still finds a way to test my imagination from time to time. Granted, I’m extremely used to proofreading and editing, and to reading things that I have written down out aloud if only to ensure that the reader won’t be left guessing even if they do agree that it passes for good work. However, that alone wouldn’t suggest that I agree with the statement that the best translations are ones which do not read like translations. When someone doesn’t agree with a text that they know to be a translation of something, it is just too easy to blame the translator for… well, something. I would find it most frustrating to write a translation of something that succeeds in being loyal to the original in every respect but which encourages an attitude of the reader toward the subject matter of it that no-one could have predicted. If it’s a negative, possibly unfair impression or conviction – especially in the likely event that it will not always be acknowledged (possibly by even the very person it started with!), let alone discussed – then chances are that it will hang like an evil whisper in the air, all because of an innocent but unlucky (careless?) choice of expression on the part of no-one but myself.
The use of hypotheticals helps – but for the purpose of my work I have let it extend to “impossible hypotheticals”. Not like that English sign in a bar in Norway which read, “Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar.” As silly as what that makes people think is, it is still logically possible. I’m talking about obviously contrived interpretations of things I read, which just could never happen at all even if the sentence “makes sense” purely as a language creation, if you know what I mean. It’s probably easier to illustrate this using a sample from a language other than English: the German sentence, “Die Gabel hat Peter geworfen” can indeed mean “Peter threw the fork”, but it can also mean, “the fork threw Peter”; no-one would “buy” the latter over the former.
Let’s look at the sentence, “As far as we knew, it hadn’t been formally adopted due to the high cost of production – looks like we were wrong”. I believe that chances are that one will be coaxed to view this as the statement of someone who is admitting that they were wrong in their thinking that the thing had not been formally adopted, the reason being the high cost of producing it. I’d say that the “looks like we were wrong” bit at the end makes this especially likely. But here’s the catch: it’s not impossible that this could be the statement of someone admitting that they were wrong in their thinking that the thing had not been formally adopted… due not to the high cost of production, but for another reason – let’s say because the whole project was abolished by someone from above – even if said reason is not specified. This is rather subtle, but deliberately choosing not to specify the reason like this could be viewed as an attempt to twist the meaning of words or to distort the reality of a situation.
As I write this, it has reminded me of that time at school when some other people and I were reading Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” in class and I was incarnating one of the characters, and there was a line that read, “I’m quite looking forward to meeting your clever husband, Lady Chiltern.” I read that line but made the mistake of saying the words “husband” and “Chiltern” in such a way that it suggested that Lady Chiltern was a man! …Definitely not!
That’s about the best explanation I can give of how, during a translation task, knowing how to read and write both languages properly may not always suffice. Even if you’re aware of relatively little-known language rules, like the whole comma splice thing in English. Indeed, there are plenty of people in the translation industry who have compiled glossaries devoted entirely to what is supposed to recognised as the “proper terminology”, which suggest rigid but sometimes hard to digest ideas about what people really mean (or “should” mean) when they say this, that or the other. (I suppose that this is the kind of mentality that Eurocrats are notorious and ridiculed for.)
On my website, I show “Communication needs the right words” as my motto. Compare this to that of this translation company http://de-office.eu/: “Communication comes first.” I really do feel like that explains my own motto better than I do! Let’s not forget that there is the “communication” of an individual statement, but there’s also “communication” in general: how it really is in relation to what we do, past present and future.
I look back on all the translation work I have done since I started as a professional translator in 2008, and I want to make it clear that, for all the diligence and commitment to the correct message (not to mention linguistic inventiveness) that I’ve shown in it, it still finds a way to test my imagination from time to time. Granted, I’m extremely used to proofreading and editing, and to reading things that I have written down out aloud if only to ensure that the reader won’t be left guessing even if they do agree that it passes for good work. However, that alone wouldn’t suggest that I agree with the statement that the best translations are ones which do not read like translations. When someone doesn’t agree with a text that they know to be a translation of something, it is just too easy to blame the translator for… well, something. I would find it most frustrating to write a translation of something that succeeds in being loyal to the original in every respect but which encourages an attitude of the reader toward the subject matter of it that no-one could have predicted. If it’s a negative, possibly unfair impression or conviction – especially in the likely event that it will not always be acknowledged (possibly by even the very person it started with!), let alone discussed – then chances are that it will hang like an evil whisper in the air, all because of an innocent but unlucky (careless?) choice of expression on the part of no-one but myself.
The use of hypotheticals helps – but for the purpose of my work I have let it extend to “impossible hypotheticals”. Not like that English sign in a bar in Norway which read, “Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar.” As silly as what that makes people think is, it is still logically possible. I’m talking about obviously contrived interpretations of things I read, which just could never happen at all even if the sentence “makes sense” purely as a language creation, if you know what I mean. It’s probably easier to illustrate this using a sample from a language other than English: the German sentence, “Die Gabel hat Peter geworfen” can indeed mean “Peter threw the fork”, but it can also mean, “the fork threw Peter”; no-one would “buy” the latter over the former.
Let’s look at the sentence, “As far as we knew, it hadn’t been formally adopted due to the high cost of production – looks like we were wrong”. I believe that chances are that one will be coaxed to view this as the statement of someone who is admitting that they were wrong in their thinking that the thing had not been formally adopted, the reason being the high cost of producing it. I’d say that the “looks like we were wrong” bit at the end makes this especially likely. But here’s the catch: it’s not impossible that this could be the statement of someone admitting that they were wrong in their thinking that the thing had not been formally adopted… due not to the high cost of production, but for another reason – let’s say because the whole project was abolished by someone from above – even if said reason is not specified. This is rather subtle, but deliberately choosing not to specify the reason like this could be viewed as an attempt to twist the meaning of words or to distort the reality of a situation.
As I write this, it has reminded me of that time at school when some other people and I were reading Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” in class and I was incarnating one of the characters, and there was a line that read, “I’m quite looking forward to meeting your clever husband, Lady Chiltern.” I read that line but made the mistake of saying the words “husband” and “Chiltern” in such a way that it suggested that Lady Chiltern was a man! …Definitely not!
That’s about the best explanation I can give of how, during a translation task, knowing how to read and write both languages properly may not always suffice. Even if you’re aware of relatively little-known language rules, like the whole comma splice thing in English. Indeed, there are plenty of people in the translation industry who have compiled glossaries devoted entirely to what is supposed to recognised as the “proper terminology”, which suggest rigid but sometimes hard to digest ideas about what people really mean (or “should” mean) when they say this, that or the other. (I suppose that this is the kind of mentality that Eurocrats are notorious and ridiculed for.)
On my website, I show “Communication needs the right words” as my motto. Compare this to that of this translation company http://de-office.eu/: “Communication comes first.” I really do feel like that explains my own motto better than I do! Let’s not forget that there is the “communication” of an individual statement, but there’s also “communication” in general: how it really is in relation to what we do, past present and future.
ADDITION
ReplyDeleteI’m sure it won’t be hard to understand what I’m talking about when I say that translating for a living is just fundamentally different from the translation work I did during my language classes back at school / university; mainly because I always do it for someone other than myself – as it is, I don’t even expect to be informed of their identity with more than 90% of the translation projects I accept!
The so-called “art of translation”, what is that exactly? I’ve stumbled on the idea of comparing “reading without trying” vs. “reading with trying”. You just know as well as I do that people tend to do the former all the time – certainly when they’re reading things written down in their mother tongue – although they may think of it as more like the latter when they are trying to “read between the lines”… whether that’s something related to reading a newspaper story or something else entirely. And while accepting translation as an art may well help to bring out your creative side when you do translation, I would dismiss translation as an art in the sense that, when I do it, I’m “not here to be expressive, but to be reflective.” In other words, personal preconceptions or prejudices must never be allowed to get in the way of my reasoning of the material that I am supposed to convey the meaning of in a new language; and I would say that that indicates an example of the difference between the concept of “objective” and the concept of “subjective” if there ever was one.
Not that it stops with what I acknowledge in the source material. I am compelled to “try to read” the English translation I write because, even if a translation does its job in theory, people can still get ideas in connection what it’s supposed to be about that I never intended; and then who would be “to blame” if not me? I talked about hypotheticals in my last comment. I embrace these hypotheticals not just in the domain of reasoning of what I understand in the original version in a translation project, but also in the domain of what I actually write in the translation product. What follows is an example of the latter rather than the former. This week I did a translation of a technical document for which one translation sentence I wrote was, “If higher settings are required please inform Fram.” I needed no help to look at that sentence out of context (in detachment), and that’s why I asked myself, “should I add the word ‘accordingly’ on the end or not?” For choosing not to add it would suggest the idea of merely informing Fram that higher settings were required; but to me, adding “accordingly” on the end suggests a little bit more than that. For a moment, I put myself in the shoes of the user: I find that “to inform Fram accordingly” here (as opposed to “to inform Fram”) means to inform Fram not just of the fact that higher settings are required, but with the inclusion of details of exactly what higher settings are actually required. And I thought of this without being briefed on what might constitute applicable settings.
And that’s that.
A SECOND ADDITION (PART ONE OF THREE)
ReplyDeleteOnce in my work as a professional translator I focussed on pre-set expressions, and asking myself whether or not they went against the astute linguistic creativity I am ever ready to exemplify in my translation projects.
Although I agree that it is never a good idea to translate “literally” (even if a given literal translation would reflect the intended meaning of the original albeit in a weird and likely difficult-to-follow way), sometimes in my translation work, when I am writing English sentences that are translation sentences of something in French or German, I have no problem writing “help sentences” before I formally decide on and write down the one that is actually to be applied. In the earliest stages of the translation process, I am not too worried about writing a “rough” sentence that may well be “square-wheeled” as long as a) the individual sentence fragments are properly defined; and b) it reflects consideration of every single word in the original (after all, I don’t want to omit any information in my translation product) even if I am not utterly convinced that I have no need to revise the English translation meaning I have attributed to any word that I have acknowledged in the original. The application of an enhanced level of literacy to write a final translation version that is likely to be easily understood and followed by any reader – something that is essentially as reader-friendly as possible – can wait.
After all, when one is translating it cannot be over-emphasised how important it is to write something that doesn’t solely “make sense” only in the way that it is wholly correct language of the target language. It is important that the translation be loyal to the original in meaning, and the reader, who would normally be receptive to ideas suggested in the translated text to at least some extent, should be able to clearly grasp ideas that are credible considering the subject matter and know that they have grasped them, together with being able to re-identify independently exactly what bits in the translation document instilled in them the convictions in question. Hence, the art of real translation indeed extends beyond the art of language – beyond resolving to get your grammar or word order or punctuation etc. correct; beyond being eager to see what you think when you decide to try stating a given idea this way, or seeing what happens when you use that linguistic construction. I’m talking about the requirement that those who do it be in touch with the “art” of experience and the kind of imagination that can probably only be described as a commitment to and pursuit of common sense.
Once again I find myself echoing a point that I have seen stated in more than one place: the prevalent assertion that the best translations are the ones which don’t read like translations. It may seem like a paradox, but who wouldn’t say that that’s the case. I believe that anyone who has read something in their mother tongue before being told or finding out that it was actually a translation from another language and being surprised by the same, would vouch for the truth in that. The “help sentences” I mentioned in the first paragraph are sentences which, while they are (at least in my case) the output of careful consideration of what I read in the original material and they “make sense” on both on a level of proper language in the translated material and at the level of common sense as far as the subject matter is concerned, ultimately may (just may) still be “too literal” in that it lacks certain pre-set expressions.
A SECOND ADDITION (PART TWO OF THREE)
ReplyDeleteCall this a generalisation, but some people are more suspecting than others when it comes to reading something that is a translation i.e. being able to judge that something that they are reading which is a translation of something, is indeed a translation, without any prior suggestion of the same beforehand. But when I talk of people being “suspecting” here, let me also proclaim the idea that one can also be “suspecting” or “unsuspecting” with regard to the subject matter that is supposed to be imparted in something they are reading which is a translation of something (whether or not they know or suspect that said material is indeed translation material is irrelevant) – or maybe it would better to say “wary” or “non-wary”. I would suggest that my best work is when I have mustered a translation which would be capable of convincing someone about its subject matter when they are NOT wary of it – I would encourage anyone to cherish and think about that one.
I suppose the perfect translator doesn’t exist. But however highly any of my clients may think of me, I would just do well to remember certain common expressions in English when translating certain things from French or German into English. Even if it is the case that literal translations (can) work – and not “work” in that the text in question CAN be understood (with effort) even if the particular words make it genuinely peculiar and / or hard to follow – time and again, after I have finished translated something I find myself recalling a certain English expression that is pretty much a “default” expression, which it somehow seems silly that I didn’t initially appropriate as my translation of a certain bit in the original. It’s just that I agree that, sometimes in translation work, it is actually well worth considering the use of certain individual words in the translated material whose equivalents are NOT present at the corresponding place in the original material, or purposely omitting certain individual words in the original material, not to include their equivalents in the translation material. In a nutshell, it’s about paraphrasing for the sake of effect and clarity. For example, it was only recently that I learned that it is said that the phrase “Revenge is a dish best served cold” is said to have originated from the French novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” by Choderlos de Laclos; on its Wikipedia article one can read the French phrase “La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid”. Translating that phrase literally would result in one ending up with “Revenge is a dish that it is eaten cold” (if not “Revenge is a dish which eats itself cold”, which any native speaker of English can see makes no sense). English “Revenge is a dish best served cold” is but a product of paraphrasing and it’s not hard to argue that it is more effective than “Revenge is a dish which is eaten cold”.
But, to go back to the subject of my work, I have noticed an improved ability to think of parallels of this independently when I am translating something for someone else who we both know has put their faith in me to do it right. And this is what has been the source of my income from October 2008 to this day…
Look at these examples, taken from certain past translation jobs:
German: “Brandschutztüren”
This German word literally means “fire protection doors“, which I suppose works well enough as it is true that everyone knows that they are a safety thing, and that they are not there for the so-called “protection of fire”! But “fire doors” is the more commonly used expression in English – it just didn’t strike me straight away, for some reason.
A SECOND ADDITION (PART THREE OF THREE)
ReplyDeleteGerman: “Die Türen müssen immer geschlossen sein und dürfen nicht unterkeilt oder arretiert werden.”
English: “The doors must be kept closed and may not be wedged or locked.”
The German sentence, “Die Türen müssen immer geschlossen sein” may mean, “The doors must always be closed”, but I felt that to say “kept closed” better reflected commitment to safety / following the safety guidelines in place that are under discussion here.
German: “Jeder Externe muss von den internen Sunrise-Kontaktpersonen am Desk abgeholt und dort auch wieder verabschiedet werden. ”
English: “Every external person must be registered by the internal Sunrise contact persons at the desk, and dismissed at the same place.”
Misunderstandings can occur when someone is left with a conviction of something based on something that they have heard or read which is not the one that the speaker / writer sought to leave them with. The reason I included a comma after the word “desk” in the English version (even though there isn’t one after “Desk”in the German version) is that the registration and the dismissal would not happen at the same time. But that’s just what I think.
German: “Der Sortimentsumfang bietet mit acht unterschiedlichen Bürstensorten jedem Zahnzwischenraum die optimal angepasste und effektive Reinigung.”
English: “With eight different brush types, the range is able to muster the best adapted and most effective cleaning solution for every between-teeth place.”
In the English version I made a point of including the word “solution”.
German: “Das neue Ebnat Oral Care Sortiment lässt sich sehen.”
English: “The new Ebnat Oral Care range is impressive.”
The German version could be translated literally as “The new Ebnat Oral Care range lets itself be seen”, but as it’s a marketing text there is every reason to believe that it should be read as more than being about letting this product be seen; surely the marketer would want it to be read as like, “this product distinguishes itself.”
German: “bis zum Beweis des Gegenteils”
English: “Until proven otherwise”
The German word “Gegenteil” is composed of the words “Gegen”, meaning “against”, and “Teil”, meaning “apart”, but here it means nothing like “opposing part” or “opposing side”or anything like that. It is supposed to be understood as “until proof of the opposite ”. This is a reminder of how not all languages work the same way, and that some use constructions which are not found in others. I would have put “until proof of the opposite ” if not for the fact that, in my experience, “Until proven otherwise” is a much more common English expression.
German: “Die Standpunkte haben sich angenähert, indem in Deutschland voreheliche Vereinbarungen einer gewissen Inhaltskontrolle unterzogen werden und in England voreheliche Vereinbarungen ein Element bei der Beurteilung der finanziellen Folgen der Scheidung geworden sind.”
English: “The viewpoints became more aligned when pre-nuptial agreements in Germany became subject to certain content control regulations while in England pre-nuptial agreements became an element in assessing the financial impact of divorce.”
In this example, the Geman word “angenähert”, of “annähern”, refers to the viewpoints, and to say that viewpoints which become more aligned have as such become “closer” sort of works, but at the end of the day is just too literal, especially if you are not accustomed reading this sort of thing.
French: “Outre les éléments relevés précédemment…”
English: “In addition to the items noted above…”
This French example is taken from a French-to-English contract translation project. The clause “Outre les éléments relevés précédemment” is capable of misleading because it is not referring to items that were noted at some earlier point in time, but to items indicated earlier in the text of the document in question. Hence the paraphrasing “In addition to the items noted above” in the English translation.