A good translator does their translation work with great care and consideration, being aware of at least some of the truths about language and the art of translation and not just sweeping consideration of them under the carpet with the complacent belief that, whatever they write in their translation product, “whatever happens, the truth is basically there for all to see even if it does require a bit of extra thinking / reasoning.” …is it? Either way, it surely takes a great translator to question their own quality policy, especially if this is unprompted. And I’m not the only one who has ever written blogs related to translation; you’ve only got to look at the discussion forums of the likes of ProZ and TranslatorsCafe, or have a look at the sorts of things that translation-related groups on LinkedIn talk about.
A translation quality policy which enables the detection of all errors: is that a possibility (however elusive) or a hopeless (yet possibly mentally debilitating) fantasy? And if it is possible, is one person enough to make it work? To their credit, lots of translation agencies have gone out of their way to define their quality policy on their websites, and in good layman’s terms. And I’m not talking about rules like not having music playing while you do it, which could prove a distraction: this sort of thing is but standard operating procedure to many people in translation work (and other things). I too have gone out my way to define my own translation quality policy. For more than a year now I’ve had a file saved on my computer which basically describes my translation work quality policy / explains why my approach to professional translation is a suitable one; it is just over 3,500 words long, far longer than even any of these comments of mine you see on my Facebook business account. For some time now I’ve been wanting to learn how to include a new page on my website, on which to post it.
There are many kinds of phobias in the world. There’s abnormal fears of certain objects or virtual objects where the reason behind it is actually not that hard to fathom (such as arachnophobia, fear of spiders; claustrophobia, fear of confined spaces; and vertigo, fear of heights). Then there are phobias with more of a social implication (such as xenophobia, fear of that which is foreign; catagelophobia, fear of being ridiculed; and peccatophobia, fear of sinning / imaginary crimes). Bart Simpson’s Guide To Life has two pages of other supposedly “honest-to-God” phobias including some which seem to make no sense at all (including linonophobia, fear of string; cathisophobia, fear of sitting; and pteronophobia, fear of being tickled by feathers). I just wonder what the phobia of making mistakes is – maybe atychiphobia? There must be one! And how close am I to suffering from it (if I don’t have it already)?
When I do translation work, I would say, in all honesty and earnesty, that I find it notably easier to make language-type corrections than corrections which revolve around a comprehensive and astute knowledge of the subject matter of the original article. Professional translators can and do underestimate how likely it is that it will be pointed out or suggested to them that they lack knowledge of the subject matter of a given piece of translation work, even if they do have good reasons to believe that what they have written is close enough to correct and where the truth “really isn’t that obscured”.
As far as this is concerned, it’s worth considering the scope of that which is taken for granted. When people boldly say that they don’t take things for granted, what they mean (well, should mean) is that they don’t take aspects of certain (usually familiar or pre-determined) situations for granted. Knowledge (and common sense), however, is taken for granted far more often with no-one really thinking much of it until it is too late (if it results in anything bad). What’s the best way to illustrate this? As far as I’m concerned, the answer to that is this: don’t you agree that there are times where people meet other people for the first time and then agree that they know stuff about them even though they have never met or seen them or heard anything about them before?
People even take things that aren’t so, for granted. We’ve seen it in Rush Hour where Jackie Chan’s character innocently tries to be friendly with black people in that bar by saying, “What’s up, my nigger?”, just like Chris Tucker’s character did; and Pat Condell shows just how much this can have sinister consequences in his video “The truth is incorrect”, in which he talks about the misleading agenda of the “progressive” consensus. It’s hard for me to imagine anything braver I can do as a professional translator than to show that I don’t take my own quality policy for granted – to question and revise it even if no-one else suggests it. Although, just like anyone else, even if I don’t know the answer concerning something in a given translation project, that doesn’t mean that I can’t seize opportunities to pursue it; and if I have to admit that I can’t do it by myself… is that really so bad? What can I say? That’s life, I guess. Sometimes I wonder exactly who I would be today and what I would be doing today / what my life would be like today if I had born in feudal Japan, or to a mountain-dwelling Inca tribe, or among the pyramids and sphinxes of Ancient Egypt, or…