Have you ever resolved to tell the truth about something only to end up very frustrated at being told (or gaining the impression) that what you do in this respect is not enough? At any rate, machine translation is a very common subject these days (even if those who discuss it – including me – tend not to bother trying to invent systems with pre-defined categories or classifications for the purpose of evaluating how good machine translators are). It’s not as if people who have invented translation software are never proud of such accomplishments but the translations that machine translators produce are often the subject of criticism – sometimes for obvious reasons, sometimes for reasons which require a bit of explanation. And however good machine translation gets – however much machines may be able to be trusted to offer apt suggestions of not just individual words, but even short phrases – people who attempt translations exclusively with the aid of machine translation tools and accept what they say uncritically should expect to be ridiculed for it. On the forums of the online translation website ProZ.com I’ve read the occasional story of someone giving someone else a piece of translation work and, when it was sent back to them, the person receiving the translation decided for themselves that it looked like nothing but a product of machine translation – before actually publicly stating the same in a comment in the forums of a translation website like ProZ. Obviously, this doesn’t do a lot of good for the image of the professional translation industry. However, where a translation is poor in one or more places, it’s not always a purely linguistic issue.
If there’s any comment on here where I engage to discuss the need to consider the subject matter when doing a translation task, it is this one. Just for a second, let’s compare it to comedy. It is a common observation that good comedians don’t laugh at their own jokes. But picture someone starting to tell a joke where, at the start, you’ve never heard it before and have no idea where that joke originated – whether they made it up themselves or they heard it somewhere. If it were a really good joke but a joke that they didn’t get – which would only mean that they heard it somewhere – what are the chances that you would fail to understand that they didn’t get it? Pretty low if you ask me. What do you think?
But this is about translation. As common as eager discussions about the “right word” or the “right phrase” are when it comes to translation (professional or otherwise), it is not that infrequently the case that that which is responsible for a defective translation is lack of knowledge of the subject matter. Say what you like about how translators must be properly literate, articulate – I know I have – but when people want to read a translation of something, they basically do it because they want to be informed about something, and that thing may be something that they would fully admit that they do not know much (if anything) about themselves. And the last thing they want is that nagging thought of the fear of believing something that isn’t – the fear of being wrong – a source of stress in a task that should be very simple i.e. simply reading something. I mean, how would you feel if you were made to talk about something you knew nothing about, whether as a gesture of pretence/disguise or otherwise?
Hence translators exchange whole glossaries of terminology for things, which may specify a particular word in a target language for a given word in an original language that is otherwise not that uncommon – it’s just that the average translator may have a totally different “standard” translation term in the target language for a given term in the original language.
The paradox about being a translator is that you are not unlikely to find yourself literally speaking for someone you don’t even know and don’t care a wit about. (This certainly happens when you work for translation agencies all over the world, as I do.) Have you ever read or heard something and found yourself going, “this looks like something written by person XYZ / something person XYZ would say?” Everyone who knows me personally (and anyone used to seeing my new business video) knows what my voice sounds like. My question is – as an example – as you sit here reading this comment, do you hear my voice saying these exact same words in your head, as if I were reading them to you? Would about someone else’s voice – maybe even your own? Why do you think people talk of people being in the love with the sound of their own voice?
And that’s the issue. How much do I really know about the subject matter of any translation task that I am offered? Maybe I could get away with being attached to these comments that exist specifically to promote my life’s work, like they were my own children (even though I’m not actually a father), but I believe that, when I invest a lot of effort in producing a professional translation, I should beware of making it only too “authentically me” purely out of my own ignorance, if that makes sense. I repeat the question I’ve just asked here: how much do I really know about the subject matter of any translation task that I am offered? How can I be sure that, at the phase when I’m considering a translation job offered me, my knowledge of its subject matter really is good enough for me to be trusted with it?
As I’ve mentioned in an earlier comment (see 9th July), sometimes when I do a translation job and I’m not sure about something, I include a post-it note for the bit in question which essentially says something like “please verify” or “please have a look at this” or “how would you put this?” For better or worse, I will admit that there are times when I just don’t know for sure whether or not my knowledge of any given subject matter really is good enough for doing a given translation job in connection with it. On those occasions when that is the case but I do accept the job, I justify such a decision on the basis of the idea that, if my final translated product did show any discrepancies, then they would be relatively minor ones; nothing that the project manager or the client couldn’t correct themselves, even if it did require that they consult someone else about it. But I’ve learned the hard way that that has its limitations. At least I realized by myself that not even having my own opinions in any given subject matter (even if they would be independent) can always be trusted to help me understand / expand my knowledge of what a given document in a foreign language of such subject matter is REALLY all about.