THERE’S AUTOMATIC TRANSLATION AND THERE’S PRETENTIOUS TRANSLATION… DO YOU KNOW THE DIFFERENCE? NOT THAT I DO…

For all my experience as a professional translator, I feel I should emphasise that I am very familiar with the theme of automatic / literal translation… but I suspect that that may provoke the following question: from how many angles?

As I write this… call me dramatic, but I feel many gazes upon me. I feel an eagerness of many to hear my response to that very question which is not too far away from the very state of being possessed. After all, when you’re talking about me in the most real sense of the word – by which I mean what I do for a living, and nothing less – surely you would realise that I do literally all I can to write translations of stuff that are every bit as reliable as they are “correct.” As such, if I indolently leaned on machine translation tools to do what I had to do, that would make me look disingenuous and complacent at the very least, right?

I inhale deeply and look up, and answer as follows: I have seen my fair share of things written in English which were written by someone whose mother tongue was not English, and which looked, shall I say, funny. I’ve read collections of queer English-language statements all specifically listed under the topic “bad translation” / “lost in translation”; sometimes on websites, sometimes in books. And I know that there is no official such thing as “realising / knowing what it’s like to write things like that”… maybe the truth is that many of us have felt – if well-intended – awkward and accident-prone at certain points in our lives. I sympathise with you if I’ve reminded you of any frustration you’ve felt as a result of such scenarios. Or maybe you’re just laughing? Come to think of it: what else can you do?

In any case, all things considered, I have to be honest: if someone were to ask me to lend my efforts to their development of a new machine translation tool, I just wouldn’t know what to think. It’s not that I tend to be reluctant to discuss things that fall under the topic of language. I just know that machine translators just have no sense of style or literary devices or anything like that – I’m just like most other people, huh?

Quote: “Love is the hardest habit to break, and the most difficult to satisfy.” (Drew Barrymore)
Suppose you had someone next you right now who doesn’t speak English, and you wanted to translate something – in this case, that quote – for them into their mother tongue so that they would understand it… would you be willing to put your faith in a machine translator or wouldn’t you? Let’s say this person was Greek; and I don’t speak Greek. Chucking that quote through Google Translate produces this:

“Η αγάπη είναι το πιο δύσκολο συνήθεια να σπάσει, και το πιο δύσκολο να ικανοποιηθούν”
Compare it with what you get when you chuck it through Babelfish: “Η αγάπη είναι το πιο δύσκολο συνήθεια να διασπάσουν, και το πιο δύσκολο να πληρούν.”
I have noticed that, in the Babelfish version, there is the word “διασπάσουν” in place of “σπάσει”, and the word “πληρούν” in place of “ικανοποιηθούν.” The results are actually more similar than I thought they would be, if you get my drift. But if I had to translate “Love is the hardest habit to break, and the most difficult to satisfy” into a language that I did not speak and in good faith, I would probably do it a segment at a time rather than as a whole i.e. “Love is the hardest habit” and “to break” and “and” and “the most difficult [probably add the word “habit” at this point]” and “to satisfy.” Think about it.

So yes, above we have looked at an example of machine / automated / literal / whatever translation of whole sentences, or otherwise workable groups of words; but now let us consider individual foreign words and their actual appropriations in another language. Example 1: although the word German word “Leitsatz” means “principle”, that word translates literally (loosely) as “guiding clause”. Seriously, if you read something like “guiding clause” (or “sentence”) in English anywhere, could you ever have arrived at the concept indicated by “principle” – having not already read this assertion that a common meaning trait can be found between “principle” and “guiding clause”; and if you can’t see that, then you’re not really looking? Or how about the other way round? If you read “principle” anywhere, could you ever have arrived at the concept indicated by “guiding clause” (or sentence)?
The second is example is this: in German, the word “Durchschnitt” means “average” in English, even though “durch” in German usually means “through” and “Schnitt” usually “cut”. I am merely wondering how it is that the standard German word for “average” came to be “Durchschnitt” – “cut-through”, as it were. Whoever it was that agreed on “Durchschnitt” as meaning “average”, was there some vague idea of “cut through something in the midway point of it”… ergo that “midway point” idea somehow ending up as the “central point” – the “average” of “the average thing” (for lack of a better expression of it)?

I will stop rambling now, to leave you to ponder what you will.
Bye bye, yours, George Trail.