MORE COMMENTS ON MY APPRECIATION / INTERPRETATION OF THE ISSUES I FACE IN MY TRANSLATION WORK – I RESOLVE TO CONFRONT IDIOLECT ISSUES IN THIS COMMENT

Before I start another long and verbose monologue about my appreciation of what I have to do to be successful as a professional translator, let me redefine the term “role-playing game”. In today’s world there are many computer games you can play where you essentially “do something for real” e.g. like when you play as a police officer or a soldier in a shoot ‘em up, or as an athlete or a motor racer in a sports game; but I’m eager to note that there are also such computer games with an entrepreneurial element – Theme Park, Theme Hospital, you get the idea. But I doubt anyone would (or could) attempt a professional translator game and seriously be able to offer a realistic experience in it…

At any rate, I find that there is indeed relatively little room for fixed and mechanical thinking in the realm of professional translation, however much you’re willing to focus and pare down. For example…

One of the frustrating things I deal with in my work as a professional translator is my particular idiolect, which sadly fails to be reader-compatible 100% of the time even though I everything I can to make sure that it is all correct English and that it leans on the formal side rather on the casual side (certainly in the world of work). I say this because, in situations in which I have done a translation job for someone and my idiolect fails to be compatible with the one reading it, it can result in them not responding to my translation work as positively as I would have liked despite the diligence with which I pursued the project; they might suggest that I have written things constituting errors (these are mostly totally borderline errors). These errors might be real errors or imaginary ones. Naturally I do all I can to avoid mistakes in my translation work, and while the very few errors I do make can usually be corrected with something more suitable easily (for it is very easy to deduce what is meant at the point in the translated text where the mistake is present – after all, isn’t getting the message across what translation is all about?), the fact is that I’m encouraged to feel ashamed of it. It’s not as if I’ve never been ashamed at translation errors I have made (I say that for the sake of convincing people of my own humility, if anything), but I’d probably feel more at ease if I devoted as much consideration to when I was being too hard on myself as I do to my work.

But this comment isn’t supposed to be about me, it’s supposed to be about idiolect, so let’s start at the beginning. And how to do that if not provide a definition of the term “idiolect” (seriously)? The term “idiolect” has its own article on Wikipedia, which defines it as follows:

“In linguistics, an idiolect is a variety of language that is unique to a person, as manifested by the patterns of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation that he or she uses. Conceptually, the language production of each person, the idiolect, is unique; linguists disagree what underlying knowledge of a language, or of a given dialect, is shared among the speakers.”
And it’s really not that hard to exemplify. In this example we see three hypothetical persons, each with a different idiolect; for all the differences that can be seen between their individual idiolects, what they are all saying is undeniably the same thing:

Person 1: “I don’t smoke at a bus stop – it might bother others.”
Person 2: “I agree that the average person is irritated by another person’s cigarette smoke; which is why I refuse to smoke at a bus stop.”
Person 3: “I refrain from having a cigarette at a bus stop on the grounds that the smoke would displease those around me.”

I’ve heard of idioms in English (and other languages), as well as figurative and metaphorical language – I would suggest that two of the best known examples in English are “it’s raining cats and dogs” and “having pins and needles”. But I’m not talking about those when I refer to “habitual” or “set” phrases here – phrases which really do tend to become part of the individual idiolect of many people – and I do mean truly “real and everyday” idiolect: the sort of idiolect that you never know where you might pick up, as opposed to the kind of idiolect you think you “should” use (so to speak) for no reason other than the fact that you’ve been specifically taught it, usually by someone you know. One example of what I have in mind here is someone saying “how did you get this number?” when they’ve received a nuisance phonecall. In this phrase the word “number” always refers to a phone number; and there’s a fair chance that the one who uses it has truly had that phrase ingrained in their idiolect to the point where they are genuinely prone to saying those exact words as part of a fixed statement, and they might find it somewhat surprising to hear that phrase used in a context other than when someone receives a nuisance phonecall. Example 2: there’s a film called Tempo, with Hugh Dancy and Rachael Leigh Cook in it. In this film there’s a scene where they are in a car together and have just stopped outside somewhere; in it, just before Rachael leans over and kisses Hugh, says goodnight to him and gets out, she says to him, “You’re not… involved, are you?” Now, anyone can claim that a person can be “involved” in anything, but this is a reminder that one widespread idiolect idiosyncrasy shared by many English-speaking people is that if they hear that a person is “involved” (the word “involved” on its own), then, as far as they’re concerned, that person must be in some sort of relationship with someone else. Now there’s something to remember if you have not yet reached the age where the concept of relationships between two people, like that of boyfriend / girlfriend, is of significance in your life all the time and you know it.

But I mean to actually relate idiolect to my work at some point here. One job I recently accepted was one from a translation agency in Latvia in which I was paid to go through five finished test translations of a short article, and mark them and comment on them where I felt the need. Although it wasn’t a proofreading or editing project as such, it really wasn’t that far away in terms of the skills it required! And although when I finished the job the person who gave me it said he was indeed impressed with my work, I dare say that it was only because I took a sledgehammer approach. The material that had been translated from one language to another in these tests was dead easy but I was prepared from the start to spend more time on this project than the person who gave me it might have guessed.

I don’t think I would be covering this bit properly without reference to the text within the test in conjunction with my own comments which I included with the various translations of it. It was an English to French translation test (yes, I marked French translations in this project even though French is not my mother tongue) and the original was this:
“Argentine lake may offer clues to life on Mars

A lake in Argentina’s remote, inhospitable northwest may offer clues on how life got started on Earth and how it could survive on other planets, scientists say.
Researchers have found millions of “super” bacteria thriving inside the oxygen-starved Lake Diamante, in the center of a giant volcanic crater located over 15,400 feet above sea level.
The bacteria’s habitat is similar to primitive earth, before living and breathing organisms began wrapping a protective atmosphere of oxygen around the planet.”

And now I quote bits from the various translations of this text, each one accompanied by a comment of mine which was supposed to reflect careful consideration. For the record, I didn’t think it was right merely to include nothing but vague statements like, “this doesn’t really work” or “this was a good idea”.

“concernant la vie sur Mars”
“ ‘Concerning life on Mars’? So it is for certain that there has been life on Mars at some point? That’s what this suggests (or would suggest) in my eyes.”
“L’habitat des bactéries est similaire à celui présent sur Terre lorsque que la planète n’était que dans un état primitif, bien avant la création d’une atmosphère d’oxygène protective par les organismes vivants”

“[with “d’une atmosphère d’oxygène”]: No mention of “the planet” but I don’t think that matters.”
“détenir les secrets de la vie sur Mars”
“idiomatic – very good”

“indices sur la façon dont la vie a commencé sur la Terre”
“More great idiomatic language that most non-French people just wouldn’t think of. Impressive. ”
“L’environnement de la bactérie est similaire à celui trouvé sur la Terre primitive”
“[with the word ‘trouvé’] – “Personally, I would have said something else, like ‘connu’ ”.
“Un lac en Argentine pourrait livrer des indices sur la vie sur Mars”

“[with the ‘pourrait livrer des indices’ bit] I think that this is a fine phrase for the information in question in French even if it wouldn’t work in English. ”
“Les chercheurs ont trouvé des millions de ‘superbactéries’ se développant dans le lac Diamante”
“[concerning the word ‘développant’] – I have to question the suitability of this choice of verb. Presumably we are talking about bacteria multiplying and gaining presence rather than just a given range of bacteria ‘growing up’ ”.

“L’habitat des bactéries ressemble à la Terre primitive”
“Shouldn’t this be more like ‘ressemble celui de la Terre primitive’ ”?

When I did this project I specifically choose to include an overall comment for each test after I’d marked it, each one four to five lines long. The comment that I wrote for one of them is as follows:
“This one had the best translation of ‘survive on other planets’ (end of paragraph 1). Generally it worked well enough but I felt that there were sentences where the meaning was on the verge of ‘deviating’ – even if they were written in such a way that the meaning was made clear again by the end of them.

7 out of 10.”
Another project I recently did was a proofreading project of a 30,000+ word English document (which had been translated from Russian, which I don’t speak). It was not like most proofreading projects I do: it was and long and erudite academic article about the major issue of torture. I was prepared to encounter subtle errors (which maybe nevertheless could have had major consequences if unaddressed) more than obvious errors. But at any rate, I was determined to be doubly attentive, and there follows two examples of what my correction work in this project

REALLY entailed:
Good 100% correct to great 100% correct:
Example 1
“the collection of information and the legal component supplement each other” to “the collection of information and the legal component go hand in hand”
Example 2

“To prove the fact of torture or other cruel treatment, medical documents are very important” to “Medical documents are very important for proving facts of torture or other cruel treatment”
But I think that I am very much aptly perceptive with this sort of thing really. At one point in this project, I decided to rewrite something as, “an ineffective investigation is the main challenge for any Russian human rights organisation that aims to combat torture” – but should that be “effective”? Let me explain. With “ineffective”, the sentence pertains to a certain kind of ineffective investigation carried out by the authorities, which the document says that the members of a Russian human rights organisation are supposed to resolve to deal with and overcome in the pursuit of their objectives. But suggest the word “effective” – the direct opposite – and all of a sudden it’s easy to believe that the sentence is making the point that the main challenge of any Russian human rights organisation is the performance of their own investigations that prove effective given the circumstances!

My second example of this is where I read this in the original: “But the practice of the largest humanitarian organisation – the Red Cross – is quite different. Its main activity is saving the lives of victims of war. If in order to get women and children out of fire, it will be necessary to pay a bribe to a senior officer of the roadblock, it will be done”. It’s probably more like “the firing line” than “fire”, because when native English speakers talk of fire they tend to talk about burning buildings and that, don’t they?