The Translator and Explanation

THE TRANSLATOR AND EXPLANATION
For all the times I’ve stated how translation is not just about replacing words with words – and I have provided examples, as I do at the end of this particular comment – I think it’s kind of strange that I don’t think I’ve ever truly appreciated the role of “explanation” in translation work until recently. (How ironic that there’s always an “explanation element” in these comments, and this one in particular!) If, when doing translation tasks, you know you’ve risen above habits of translating word-for-word to think of and use expressions that will make the in-development translated product more digestible, good for you. But consider this: there’s certainly very little room for a mechanical approach when translating something where appreciation of a certain style is required, like marketing material.

So what does that make me? “A master of explanation”? I can imagine you thinking “WTF” or “LOL” with that one. Now, I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, and I fear that I risk looking complacent. I can already imagine readers of this comment laughing at the idea of the alleged label “master of explanation” being a “great thing”, but surely a professional translator should aspire to be “a master of explanation” (although consider also the work of teachers, lawyers, doctors and scientists among others). And I know as well as everyone else does that people explain things to other people all the time – and that people’s explanations of things cannot always be understood by everyone (I certainly hope that constitutes an explanation that could be understood by everyone; I’ve done my best to make it so!). For example, you might go to the doctor and, after they have asked you some questions and done some things with you to determine symptoms: when they have identified something that they understand even though they cannot see it directly, which you probably wouldn’t be able to understand yourself even if they tried to describe it to you, you watched as they proceeded to document a report containing “medical babble” that’s just alien to the layman.

And I proclaim that mine is a job which is not to be trifled with (no disrespect to people with low pay jobs like cleaner, waiter, refuse collector etc.), because successful achievement in it depends on a role of sound explanation. The role of explanation attributed to my job basically revolves around words and languages / literacy – and the intended messages contained in that which is written (in both the language of the original article and the language of the translation product). When I mention the latter, this includes how to be sure of understanding the correct message (even if there would be any flaws in how the message is presented in the original) and how to articulate it in a new language in a way that won’t be ambiguous or anything, just for future reference. And gaps and inaccuracies in my knowledge of either language (the language of the original material or the language that I am translating it into) would definitely go against me here! I’m going to host an exercise in explanation right now, with a short passage in French that I myself wrote. Here goes:

“Bonjour, ma vieille porcelaine ! Je suis en train de collecter mon sifflet et flûte, mais après l’avoir retourné à mon chat et souris, je peux venir à toi et nous pouvons aller au croiseur de bataille et boire quelques oreilles de cochon. Trié, mon fils !”
If you speak French, you should agree that this is proper French even if it doesn’t make sense. If you are confused – and I fully expect that you would be – the fact is that no French person would ever talk like this either. Can you see the truth?
OK, here’s the truth. Most French people don’t know Cockney Rhyming Slang, much less use it, but you have to understand both French and Cockney Rhyming Slang to understand that passage. Here’s my translation of it:
“Hello, my old china! I’m currently picking up my whistle and flute, but after I’ve returned it to my cat and mouse I can come round your place and we can go to the battle cruiser and drink a few pig’s ears. Sorted, my son!”

I have some gamebooks (the kind of book where you create a character and go on some sort of quest in a fictional world and roll dice when engaging in combat etc.). One of these is “The Curse of the Mummy” (Fighting Fantasy Series, Steven Jackson and Ian Livingstone) in which, depending on how you play it, there takes place events of your character learning a language and translating from one language to another which simply don’t make sense in my eyes (yes, I know anything can happen in fiction, especially if it’s fantasy fiction, but I’m trying to make a serious linguistics-related point or two here, so if I would appreciate it if you would bear with me). At the start of the adventure the language your character speaks is a fictional one called Allansian, and completing the quest successfully (however you play it) requires that you familiarise yourself with another language (which is, of course, also fictional, if otherwise “real” within the world of the gamebook itself), called Djaratian. What this involves: you have to get a papyrus scroll on which is inscribed a copy of the Djaratian alphabet from Cranno (the actor who keeps a sabre-toothed tiger as a pet) and then, when you get to Lopar the shaman and after having answered his conundrum, show the scroll to him, whereupon he explains how to “translate the hieroglyphs into Allansian”. I’m like: hmmm… how can this be? How can you even develop knowledge of a new language proper with just a copy of its alphabet, let alone muster translations from it? Surely you need some grasp of the grammar and vocabulary of that language? Does Lopar actually know Djaratian? (I’ll never know, because the writers include no clues anywhere in the book as to whether he does or not; but then chances are they never properly considered it anyway, if you know what I mean.) Or do the languages of Allansian and Djaratian have a number of parallels (which I have to admit I couldn’t even begin to define – what they might be is anyone’s guess; and even this is only hypothetical) and that is the only reason that it is somehow possible to translate from Djaratian to Allansian SYSTEMATICALLY (yes, it does sound weird and crazy, doesn’t it)? You probably won’t be surprised to hear this but the book provides no basis for learning either Allansian or Djaratian if you ever wanted to for some reason – what if Mr. Jackson and Mr. Livingstone met the people who invented Klingon?

It does beg one question: if you have knowledge of a language’s alphabet – remember learning the ABCs? (not that I do) – then you can read words of that language, or at least get an idea of how certain sequences of the letters would be pronounced as a whole. And you don’t actually have to know the meanings of these words – I mean, anyone literate in English would know how to pronounce this “word”: “thrave”, even if it is purely made up (by myself); I will specifically clarify that, for the record, it doesn’t mean anything, it has no meaning attached to it. Like I said, it is a completely made up “word”. But I don’t buy the idea that you can “read” hieroglyphs. After all, hieroglyphs look more like “pretty pictures” (like birds and stuff – ring any bells?) than part of an alphabet with which people write words for other people to understand. Funnily enough, I find myself thinking back to my time at University, during which one of my lecturers (Dr. David Hornsbyhttp://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/french/staff/DavidHorns… – and this guy has a First Class MA in Foreign Languages from Oxford, among other university-level credentials) told us that many languages have no written form. But my question is this: OK, so a hieroglyphs writing system includes pictures representing things, but aren’t there any principles that could be applied as to understanding how they are pronounced, like with languages whose writing system is composed of letters? How do we know that Tutankhamun’s name really was Tutankhamun? I actually looked up hieroglyphs on Google and under “images” you can see files in which there are individual hieroglyphs next to individual letters in the English language – like, why? Like that’s how hieroglyphs really work. As far as I see it, English and the language of the ancient Egyptians are as different as chalk and cheese! Especially since, according to Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary Of The English Language (Literary Guild Inc., New York and Toronto, 1958), English evolved from Indo-European; and according to Wikipedia the language of the ancient Egyptians was of the Afro-Asiatic family, a family which isn’t even recognised in the subdivisions of the Indo-European languages (Germanic, Celtic, Italic/Romance etc.).

Back to the gamebook thing: there is a point where, depending on how you play the game, you ACTUALLY LEARN DJARATIAN. Depending on how you play this gamebook, after you (or rather, your character) has learned how to translate Djaratian hieroglyphs into Allansian (and only after they have learned how to translated Djaratian hieroglyphs into Allansian; and again, don’t ask me), there may come a point where you ACTUALLY LEARN DJARATIAN when you are “granted the wisdom of Khunam” – this would actually include a knowledge of the grammar and lexical items (i.e. words) of Djaratian. Think of it as like having a genie or a wizard click their fingers and then all of a sudden you learn (or would “know” be a more fitting word?) a new language. Again, I would agree that it sounds bizarre to say the least, but it is what it is. But if you learnt a new language like this… like, what do you think would be the first things you realised? For a start, to compare your sudden knowledge of the new language to your knowledge of languages that you already know: what differences are there? What similarities (or “half-similarities” – note the inverted commas)? What “new ideas”? And do you think you could always explain it all? Of course, I wouldn’t expect a coherent answer here; I would just consider this a “thought for the day thing.”

OK, I can’t explain the linguistic / literacy facts behind any of this… but if anyone’s going to point it out, I will.

I end by saying that I continue to EXPLAIN linguistic conundrums I come across in my professional translation work projects and therefore the content of said projects…
I recently did a project where – consider this – I had to read the French version of this building specifications document and a similar document in German, and then make updates in the German one based on what I read in the French one. I noted with curiosity that the French version included the expression “le second oeuvre” for which the corresponding expression in the German version was given as “die Ausbauten” – the English translation of these expressions would be “the extensions work”. It’s all easy to translate the French expression “le second oeuvre” as either “the second work” or “the subsequent work” (or words to that effect), but it was supposed to be understood as “the extensions work” in this context, judging by the given German equivalent of it.
In one German to English project I read “der alleine entscheidet” in the original German version. For a phrase of only three words (and relatively short ones, especially in German!) I remember how I had to be careful about how I translated this into English – it could quite easily mean the concept of someone deciding alone (independently) or that of someone being the only person authorised to decide on something (like ruling on a given issue).

How the French and Germans say that something is a priority thing: the French often use “A passe avant B” (lit. “A passes before B”) while the Germans often say “A steht vor B” (lit. “A stands in front of B”). There is a difference in the English equivalents, even though they both mean the same thing.
I find that a part of being truly accomplished at translating is having a sense of things that are correct only in theory (and it’s not necessarily whole sentences). For instance, German “Arno Dietz, früher Geschäftsführer beim Schweizer Händler Bächli Bergsport und drei Jahre lang Schöffels Head of Product Management”, as I read in the original version of one German to English translation project, might be interpreted in English as “Arno Dietz, formerly the managing director at the Swiss company Bächli Bergsport and the head of Schöffel’s product management for three years.” But I didn’t translate it into English as that. To read that English statement alone (out of context), it is credible that Arno Dietz has been the head of Schöffel’s product management for the past three years, or that he is on contract to hold that position for three years (and this hypothetical contract has not necessarily only just commenced!). Thus my English translation of this was “Arno Dietz, formerly the managing director at the Swiss company Bächli Bergsport and Schöffel‘s Head of Product Management for three years”.
During a translation I did of a German marketing document into English, I read “erhältlich ab Mitte September” in reference to certain products. On the surface, this means “available from mid-September” and this would have in fact been a perfectly fitting translation of it given the context I read it in, but I understood that what it really meant was “in shops from mid-September”, and that is how I translated it.

In one German to English translation project I read this in the original: “In Deutschland kamen die Waveboards erstmals 2007 auf den Markt”.
Old English translation: In Germany, the waveboards arrived on the market for the first time in 2007
New English translation: The waveboards first arrived on the German market in 2007.

It does strike me that, sometimes when business quotes speak of what they “include”, it’s not always so much a case of “include” as of “what the deal (probably wholly) is composed of”.
To me, a likely source of ambiguity in communication is when you read what passes for sentences which do not speak for themselves. “I am a professional translator” is a sentence which speaks for itself but “I think so” (when out of context) is not. Any meaning that should be reflected by “I think so” cannot exist without inferring the content of some other communication to which it is related.

In German, “Ausgangssituation” can mean “context” in English – and not “exit situation” or, to put it less literally, “end situation”, which, when you think about it, is pretty much an opposite meaning! (Isn’t it?)

The German word “Raumhöhe” may mean “room height”, but some may insist on the term “ceiling height” in English. Think about it.
With one German to English translation project I did which referred to large machinery, the German term “Außentemperatur” meant “ambient temperature” in English, not “outside temperature”. That’s one thing I’m glad no-one needed to point out to me. It’s just that it’s not a question of the machine in question being used outside (whether it actually is used outside or not!)
Here’s another German term I came across in the building specifications translation project (German to English) I mentioned earlier: “Allgemeinbereichen”. What this means in English is “public areas” and not “general areas” – whatever the exact definition of that is supposed to be.