What can I say

WHAT CAN I SAY?

If you’ve ever believed that a willingness to be inventive is important in translation, then I am confident you will find this latest comment of mine enlightening (if you read it carefully enough).
Do you know what is meant by the phrase “Catch 22” in English? Google defines it as “a dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions.” In other words, a difficult and unfavourable situation where solutions are precluded by other difficult and unfavourable situations. I had to say it; I hope you’ll see why here.

Compare that statement to this one, which actually was born entirely of my own independent thinking: there’s probably an expression or saying in some language (present or past) which refers to a case where one mistakenly believes that they are the first to invent something; that is, when they “invented” it in their own eyes, they genuinely believed that they were the first to invent it, only the truth is that the thing has already been invented by someone else. Or maybe there’s an expression designating such a thing or such a person; who knows?
So why do I say those things? Well, I for one would certainly agree that a capacity for being inventive helps one to be confident in translating… and to produce translations which actually work and can be trusted. That said, the scenario of a translation being dismissed even though it was “correct” technically, is something I am familiar with. You could say that it is both a good thing and a shame at the same time.

At any rate, as far as I’m concerned, I have indeed proven myself as a translator – I have proven myself for my translation ability and for my writing ability in general. I’m going to start rhyming for a bit here, discussing the start of a typical day in my working life: in the morning at eight, when I’ve stirred, it’s like: I achingly yearn for nice chances to display that my work is tight. A flood of emails don’t hurt when I see some people asking me if I’m currently an available service guy, and my raging determined side helps make sure that fate won’t disturb my pride.
It’s easy for me to say that I’m proud of that rhyming there, but having said that, I must ask this: was that really me being inventive or were the rhyming statements that I came up with in that little rhyming session born of chance happening, if you know what I mean? You can decide. The truth is, I would say that it’s the latter, not least because I was originally going to write about a whole typical day in my working life, not just the beginning of one.

Yes, I have considered the need for flexible thinking and imagination in translation – and I wonder if, in general and as a rule, translators have a better idea and awareness of self-deception than those who are not translators – certainly as far as words and people’s interaction are concerned, if not anything else. In translation there is simply no substitute for familiarity with subject matter, but the same does ring true for individual expressions as well. A case in point: I was recently looking at property ads (wondering when it will be time for me to get my own place), and some of them included the statement “[a certain amount of money] per pcm”. Now… when I saw that, I… just imagined that, for those for whom the idea of getting their own place is a million miles away, when they see “pcm” they just might think, “now what the bloody hell is meant by that acronym?”, and possibly delude themselves into thinking that it is some kind of strictly industry-specific term that simply must go over the heads of themselves and everyone else just like them. Well, I won’t delay clarifying that I was capable of working out independently that what it stands for is “per calendar month”. The phrase really is that simple, and self-explanatory to anyone who would come across it.

To be truly “loyal” in translation… Paul Valery said, “Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.” But what exactly is meant by “meaning” here, anyway?
Whereas some things seem to mean whatever we want them to mean (subjective thinking): sexy, cool, funny etc.

There is one thing that is true: when a translation is done for someone, the person that it is for either does read through it before accepting it proper or he / she does not. It is possible for a person A to ask a person B to do a translation for them even though person A has a knowledge of the language of the source text; but I can’t think of any other scenario where, after the translation is completed, person A would actually check the translation text against what is in the original, for the sake of “accuracy” or “correctness” or “clarity”… you will have noticed that the words “accuracy”, “correctness” and “clarity” are indeed in inverted commas there: it’s all about person A trying to find something – anything, which is usually most indefinite – to allay some sort of concern or concerns which is / are not necessarily based on anything real, or which they have not necessarily taken the time to substantiate.

But then, if you ask me, in an ideal world, people like to read things which sound to them like they could have been written by themselves. The closer a piece of writing is to a person’s individual idiolect, the less likely they are to argue about its content. That’s what I think. And people know subconsciously that the closer a piece of writing is to their individual idiolect, the more confident they would feel about reading it without looking lost, and about answering out-of-the-blue questions about its content, whether the answers they gave would be true or false.
Indeed, there are cases where, after a translator has finished doing a piece of work for someone, the person who it was for has the temerity to ask them if they used a machine translator to do it. I’m going to bring up a news story from The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/11/ed… and debate which phrases probably could be translated into another language reliably using just a machine translator, and which I doubt could be translated into another language reliably using just a machine translator, giving my reasons in each case.
In the first paragraph:

“Ed Miliband has moved to contain rising panic over Ukip’s growing threat to Labour by pledging a raft of hard-headed measures to ensure that migrants ‘earn the right’ to state benefits and face stiff English language tests before taking up jobs.”

I don’t agree that this could be reliably translated into another language using a machine translator alone. For example, “raft” could be translated in the sense of the wooden contraption that floats on water; a machine translator could never translate Ukip, which is of course the acronym for the UK Independence Party; and in the “state benefits” bit, the word “state” is, in this case, a noun rather than a verb but it just seems to me that a machine translator would take it as the verb “to state” rather than the noun “state” as in “country”.

Paragraph three:
“Miliband stands accused by some in his party of failing to do enough to counter Ukip and of allowing Nigel Farage to amass support in Labour heartlands as well as Tory areas by exploiting worries over immigration.”

I wouldn’t trust a machine translator alone to muster a reliable translation of this either. For one thing, the grammatical constituents of “Miliband stands accused by some in his party of failing” are enough to form a whole sentence, but then the same is true with “Miliband stands accused of failing”; “by some in his party” is just an inserted adverbial clause, and as such any machine translator asked to translate “Miliband stands accused by some in his party of failing” could end up confused by the whole thing and thereby be likely to render a translation which didn’t make sense. And I would suggest that a machine translator could only muster a literal translation of a word like “heartlands”, and would not know what was meant by “Tory” (which here is a noun, used like an adjective, which could scramble things a bit).

In the first sentence of the fourth paragraph, the entire noun element is “Concern that Ukip could wipe Labour out in many northern seats next May”. I couldn’t help noticing that the “wipe out” verb is split in that “Labour” is in between “wipe” and “out”, and that would likely prompt a machine translator to go off on a tangent if you ask me. And in the bit where it says, “after the anti-EU party failed by only 617 votes to oust Labour in its previously safe seat of Heywood and Middleton in Greater Manchester”, I couldn’t promise you that a machine translator would differentiate between “the anti-EU party failed by only 617 votes” and “the anti-EU party failed by only 617 votes to [do something]” when applying its AI for its usual purpose. I’ve also imagined that the very first word, “concern”, might – might – be taken as an imperative tense verb (or command, if you will) rather than as the noun it is by a machine translator assigned to translate this. It’s the same with the word “surges” in the first clause in paragraph six: who’s to say whether a machine translator would “take it as” a verb rather than as a noun given the other words in that clause?

I wonder… in my life I have seen sentences which look strange to say the least but they are proper sentences. Like “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo…” and all that. Let’s read the first sentence of paragraph seven: I read, “While he claims that his core message that the economic recovery is not benefiting most people” and, after the word “people”, was inclined to view that as the end of that clause; but then I saw “has resonance” at the end of it… those two words basically forced me to revise my whole view and interpretation of that clause, and I have to admit that the grammatical rules of proper English are still adhered to in every respect.

Paragraph four ends with the clause, “with immigration a lower priority”. Just how aptly could a machine translator translate this into another language given that there is no verb for it to work with?

“Sources close to Miliband made clear that the announcements would go further than Labour’s existing plans to extend the period EU migrants must be in the UK before claiming out-of-work benefits to six months” – here the accusative noun of the verb “to extend” is “the period EU migrants must be in the UK before claiming out-of-work benefits”. This could definitely “screw with a machine translator’s mind” if you ask me.

Looking at the start of the penultimate paragraph (“In an interview with the Observer, Mark Reckless”), I think that any machine translator would make the so-called mistake of translating this guy’s surname. Also, later on in that paragraph, I think that “refused to rule out following” would be likely to confuse a machine translator. And, at the point where it says, “You should never say never in politics,” just how likely would a machine translator be to treat the second “never” as a noun?

On the other hand, I believe that this paragraph could be translated reliably using a machine translator alone:
“One key figure said: ‘We have had no real response to Ukip, who are now our main opposition in large parts of the north. We just assumed Ukip was the Tories’ problem. The worry is that it is a bush fire spreading everywhere.’ ”

All the grammatical structures here are linear, with no inserted words or phrases liable to complicate one’s understanding of one clause, followed by the next and so on. In addition…
I saw that this is the end of one paragraph: “It is expected that Labour will impose language tests on migrants to ensure those applying for public sector jobs have a level of proficiency as a condition of being taken on.” I am confident that, here, in this case, the word “to” with the verb “ensure” would be regarded by a machine translator as a preposition rather than strictly as part of “to ensure” in the infinitive, and that’s why I would trust a machine translator to translate this whole sentence reliably.

Part of paragraph four says, “senior Labour figures say the party has been caught unawares by Ukip”. I think a machine translator could be trusted to translate that reliably, as the nouns, even if they are of different cases, are not intermingled, and the same is true with verbs in this example (like, this is not the case with “The anxiety so many feel is not the fault of people in their community that are different from them.” in the last paragraph.)

Paragraph eleven is, “Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper added her voice to those calling for Labour to do more to tackle Ukip: ‘We should talk more about immigration and the things people are worried about,’ she said.” I’m confident that a machine translator would translate this well. To me a sentence’s main verb is the one of the foremost core parts of it; all the proper and actual meaning in this sentence sprouts from it. And I agree that a machine translator is much more likely to translate a sentence properly (or even properly-ish) if its main verb is, in of itself, unequivocally of a given tense and if the most important noun elements of the sentence (nominative, accusative and dative) are located as close as possible to its main verb.