Unconventional Translation Training

UNCONVENTIONAL TRANSLATION TRAINING

I know very well that I’m not the only person who’s ever rabbited on at length about how translation is not as easy as it might seem. Even for someone like me, who does it for a living, I sometimes end up in situations where I can only really lean on my own ingenuity to come up with something that will work… and however relaxed I may be feeling at the time, it is always going to be limited by my own imagination. After all, you just can’t always consider translation work done based solely on what you know (or what you think you know). And I guess I’ve always known this: indeed, from a comment dated 6th October 2014 I quote, “Let’s face it: smart translation is as much about understanding the impossible as it is about understanding the possible.”

There is a big difference between having / gaining knowledge and applying (or attempting to apply) it (and I would suggest that all of us have denied the very same at some point in our lives). Especially when what really matters is you applying knowledge other than that which, in your case, is the kind of knowledge you once had someone specifically try to teach you from the start. Learning how to learn: now that is something that is likely to change a person’s life forever, whether or not the person would change forever with it. In the case of translation, the knowledge that someone – anyone – would attempt to teach a translator in the making from the start would include knowledge of a foreign language, including vocabulary of it, its grammatical constructions and blah blah blah; then followed by discussions of what matters as far as understanding the true meaning and feel of a message in a given language is concerned. Knowledge other than that which matters for the translator would and does include – and I know I’ve said it before – awareness of subject matter, and maybe psychology when you consider the kind of response which should be triggered in readers.

Maybe a few more of these “work-related anecdotes” such as I have discussed in previous comments can be trusted to reflect this point.
In a French to English project:

In the French original: “Parce que les mots, faussement légers mais jamais dénués de sens, ont depuis toujours une importance particulière pour la chanteuse”
My English translation: “Because the words, which are misleadingly light but never meaningless, have always been of special importance to the singer”.
What I’m proud of here is how “faussement” was not translated literally as “falsely”; it was a matter of acknowledging a certain element of possibility of deception. That was why I translated that word as “misleadingly”.

In a German to English project:
In the German original: “Der Agent ist nicht verpflichtet, über den Prinzipal vermittelte Geschäfts- und Kundenkontakte anzunehmen.”
My English translation: “The Agent is not required to retain any business or customer contacts they have received from the Principal.”
In this case, “über den Prinzipal vermittelte Geschäfts- und Kundenkontakte” is the entire accusative noun element in this sentence – “über” is part of the adjectival bit and not a preposition related to the main verb (“anzunehmen”). I was glad that I caught that.
In another French to English project:
In the French original: “Pour vous, dans quelle mesure l’événement de création de moments est-il pertinent pour célébrer BEAUTYFOOD?”
My English translation: “To you, to what extent is this event that is a chance to make things happen relevant as far as celebrating BEAUTYFOOD is concerned?”
I decided against translating “moments” literally. It took me a bit of time before I decided that the best translation I could think of for “l’événement de création de moments” was “this event that is a chance to make things happen”, but I’m proud of myself for thinking of that one (however small it may seem)!
In another French to English project:

In the French original: “Sa voix grave, reconnaissable entre toutes, s’occupe de faire le reste.”
My English translation: “His deep voice, which is unmistakable, tends to do the rest.”
“reconnaissable entre toutes” translates into English literally as “recognisable among others”. I remember thinking, “There must be a better English translation expression than that”; then I came up with a phrase which I know has been used many times before: “unmistakable”. I gave myself credit for that one. Oh, and how I translated “s’occupe de faire le reste.”
In the same project:

In the French original: “Mais loin de se contenter de ce hit international, Bryan Adams est devenu au fil du temps une référence en matière de ballades rock acidulées”
My English translation: “But, far from being content with this international hit alone, over time Bryan Adams has become a benchmark for acidulated rock ballads”
Again, regarding, “se contenter de ce hit international”, I would say that I was sage not to translate literally – it’s just that, in this case, it’s was the thinking of and the insertion of an entirely new word, “alone”, that was the key factor.
In the same project:
In the French original: “Ce n’est pas tous les jours qu’on a 5 ans !”
My English translation: “You don’t become five years old every day!” as opposed to the literal translation, “You’re not five years old every day!” Even if that is undeniably true, it’s a bizarre thing to read, isn’t it?

In another French to English project:
In the French original: “L’ERP reçoit des SI métier des factures accompagnées de justificatifs qu’il enregistre.”
My English translation: “The SI companies shall send the ERP invoices accompanied by supporting documents that it has registered.”
I find that a commitment to being concise helps me to do clear translation work well and confidently, and that’s why I wrote “The SI companies shall send the ERP invoices” rather than translating “L’ERP reçoit des SI métier des factures” literally as “The ERP shall receive invoices from the SI companies” or anything very similar to that – it just doesn’t work. But more important is how I refused to translate “enregistre” in the present tense. In this sample of writing, “has registered” should be regarded as “will have registered”, which, in a context of how it is meant to be understood that the registration of supporting documents is fully expected of someone here as part of a certain process, basically amounts to the present tense in its own right.
In a more recent German to English project, I read this in the original:

“Bei erhöhten Werten erklingt ein Alarm”.
I decided against any form of literal translation revolving around “increased values”, instead writing “An alarm will sound if values are high enough” as the English translation of this.
I read this in the original in the same project:
“Luxmodo setzt europaweit auf zahlreiche Vertriebspartnerschaften, die sich auf die Distribution hochwertiger mobiler Accessoires und von Zusatzgeräten spezialisiert haben.”
My English translation of it was, “Luxmodo has landed and continues to land several marketing partnerships throughout Europe which specialise in the distribution of high quality mobile accessories and additional devices”, where I did something uncommon with the verb “setzen” in the present tense, and also decided to translate the verb “spezialisieren” in the perfect tense rather than in the perfect one, simply because it “works better”.

You know that multi-syllable rhyming I did in my last comment? And how I just had to ask whether it was me being genuinely inventive or allowing for inventiveness left to chance, as it were? From that I feel a lot more sharp when it comes to distinguishing between tasks whose success is fixed and absolute, and tasks whose success you will only know when you see it. Certain tasks of either category may well be very important, but at the end of day knowing which category a given task belongs to is just a matter of common sense, or is that just me? Either way, it can be hard to categorise which of the two translation is – maybe it depends. Some people are very strict about the use of proper terminology, for instance. But – and this is an important point – I ALWAYS make a point of allowing time for the arguments of my clients, even if I can see that they’re completely stupid, misguided and dogmatic.

Hence my interest in pondering the domain of less conventional translation training. You know, the official Gangnam Style video on Youtube exceeded 2 billion hits a long time ago, but how many non-Korean people who have seen it have ever actually bothered to seek a translation of the Korean lyrics into their own language? I would say relatively few; wouldn’t you agree? As it is, I found an English translation once, and here is a link to it

(it had fewer than 650,000 views on 29th October 2014). I also point out that I have also seen a Youtube video where the original Korean lyrics are entered into Google Translate and then “sung” by it in turn thanks to the audio recognition software it has. Is it even possible to do that without the help of a native Korean speaker (and I certainly can’t write Korean using my laptop’s keyboard… if I knew the Korean alphabet, never mind the language)? Do you really think you could reproduce the original Korean version of Gangnam Style by having a translation of the song translated (back) into Korean by Google Translate and replacing individual words here and there? Do you really think using found lists of synonyms and the like alone would be enough to help you accomplish this? Do you really think that that kind of extreme patience alone would be enough, because I somehow don’t think so! After all, “languages work differently”, isn’t that right? God, I really have no idea what I’m talking about here, huh? But only in the sense that I don’t know Korean. I suppose anyone could get a dictionary listing synonyms in Korean, but I’m sure that merely learning basic Korean alone wouldn’t be enough if I wanted to get Google Translate to sing the original lyrics of Gangnam Style myself; I would need extensive examples, allowing for challenge requiring virtually unrestrained flexible thinking, condition scenario exploration and obscure paraphernalia born of imagination which is not necessarily anywhere near close to being on the same wavelength as my own mindset. Ultimately, I’m never going to pretend that there’s any such thing as a typical example of this, any more than there is a typical example of “the kind of person who’s like, ‘well, I don’t regard them as an enemy, but I wouldn’t want them for a friend either.’ ” To explore this whole idea: that is the kind of unconventional translation training that I am talking about.

But I will stand by the idea that there’s no substitute for good old education to help form a translator worth the name. You know what education is, don’t you? Yes, of course you do. But how about actually looking up the term in a dictionary? Or what if I told you that it is possible to find an authoritative-sounding definition of the term in something that is not so dry and academically constipated as a dictionary? I mean, I’m fascinated by the definition of “education” provided by the official Wikia of Sid Meier’s Civilisation V:

“Education, the concept of systematically transferring abstract knowledge to others in a process other than the objective teaching of a trade to a young apprentice, changes the way civilization treats knowledge as a whole. The utility of educating others is quickly proven as groundbreaking discoveries in all spheres follow soon after the spread of knowledge.”

I’ve never played the game myself, but I am aware that if you do play it you can get your civilisation to pursue acoustics, which is the study of sound. “The study of sound”? What do you say to a phrase like that? Actually, I can provide a response to it with some sort of coherence in it: when I was at school, I remember learning in physics that the speed of sound is something over 300 metres per second, but the thing is… as easy as it is to understand what that means, how do people find out things like that? It all goes over my head, you know? I imagine that, right now, the best you can hope for at this point is me being forthright honest and clear that I am insistently believing that this is an unusually frank admission of my own ignorance for the greater good. …Which is my point exactly! Even if I were to say, “it’s just thoughts”, thoughts can be very powerful things, isn’t that right? I mean, the Holocaust, 9/11… all the world’s major atrocities started with mere thoughts; think about it! Thus, I am proudly more open to ideas about translation training, conventional or otherwise, than most people probably couldn’t even begin to appreciate or get their head around.

If that makes me a mad translator (like a mad scientist), than brilliant, because translation is essentially all about making sense.