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.