Understanding your own misunderstandings

TRANSLATION ERROR: UNDERSTANDING YOUR OWN MISUNDERSTANDINGS INDEPENDENTLY

I’ll begin this comment by making what I regard as a long overdue point. I’m sure there are loads of pursuits / interests / “things” where your success in them is almost exclusively determined by what you remember or can remember. And after you’ve been engaging in them long enough you start to develop more, more clear impressions about what you really “should” be remembering compared to what you remember which is superfluous but which nevertheless helps you personally and drives you – it may well be things you knowingly consider yourself lucky enough to remember. Now, as important as the role of remembering things usually is in translation, sometimes only the translator’s own judgement and innovation can be enough to provide them with any sort of confidence – is it so hard to believe? Why do you think so many people have said that translation is not just about replacing words with words and all the rest of it, after all? And why do you think that it’s so easy to find people on translation forums who say that passion is important in translation (certainly professional translation, at any rate)?

The role of translation is essentially one of making something clear to someone else… and being willing to be the first one to guide them when something needs clarifying. I would even suggest that everyone should consider the importance of learning how to make points in a lucid enough way where they are not hopelessly dependent on examples (which may well be likely to be examples that are strictly from one’s own personal experience) if they are going to be understood and taken seriously (maybe this is why the Spartans were so keen on teaching their children how to speak laconically). This is why I say that, on the basis of that: when you can’t help but question your own decisions during translation work, I would equate it to teaching something that you know to be unverified but you’re just not certain that asking questions would help. At the end of the day, it’s all up to you.

I believe that it’s easy enough to understand that, in translation, just because a translation of something might be grammatically correct in every respect and articulate and everything, doesn’t mean that it’s proper for actual, real-world consumption or use by real people you don’t necessarily know (or indeed will ever know) and whose judgements you can’t always hope to speak for or claim to understand. So the question here is: when you’re doing translation work and someone makes a mistake claim which you would love to label as too obscure or flippant but or afraid to, how can you be sure of understanding your own misunderstandings… without someone else’s help?

I make a point of clarifying what I’m talking about even to the more lazy minds reading this. Ergo: some machine translation tools are better than others, while some are more likely than others to take written material in a source language and to produce incomprehensible gibberish in the target language “out of it”. I find that this is especially likely if the original material has a lot of punctuation in it, for example. And lots of people know (at least in theory) that “languages don’t always work the same”. But I find that Google Translate can be trusted to produce a reliable translation of even certain kinds of relatively long sentences – certainly the one “Love is the only thing that never gets easier the more you do it” – in just about any language.

I may be a translator, whose purpose is essentially to make proper, lucid written sense of things for others, but I believe that everyone has things that they want people to understand without having to explain it – even if they COULD put it into understandable language to begin with. This is the spice of culture – this is but a reminder that culture does matter when it comes to getting translations of things correct. After all, is it really that hard to believe that people can easily enter into animated discussion about what does work as the correct translation of something and what doesn’t? I would suggest that these work-related anecdotes I keep posting illustrate it well – here is the latest batch in this comment:
French original: “Type Pandrol ou équivalent en substance”

English translation: “Type Pandrol or close equivalent”
I understood the proper gist of “équivalent en substance” to be “substantially equivalent” in English.
When a noun in a foreign language which is a tangible object is used for a noun which is a concept in English (compare “calendrier” in French with “calendar” and “schedule” in English)
In a German to English project I did, I saw the word, “Federkabeltrommel” in the original, and eventually came to understand that “Trommel” meant “reel” rather than “drum”. Not a musical instrument drum, necessarily – but “Trommel” essentially means like “some sort of solid cylinder device” even if you have to find something out yourself.
It is important to know when “Lieferzeit” in German means “delivery period” and when it means “delivery time” – certainly when you’re translating something like a contractual agreement.
French original: “les artistes se produiront à travers la France”

English translation: “the artists will be performing throughout France”
To me it’s not likely that many people whose mother tongue is not French would have thought of the correct translation of “se produiront” – “will be performing” straight away. But I knew that it couldn’t have been, “The artists will be producing themselves throughout France!” That would just have been not just literal translation on my part, but shamefully ignorant and careless literal translation. But I know better than that!

French original: “Pour se mêler à la course au titre, ils devront se montrer intraitables devant leur antre du Stade de France.”
English translation: “To have a chance winning the title, they will indeed have to stand firm on their home ground at the Stade de France.”
That is my English translation; for allowing a literal translation would have yielded something like, “To integrate themselves in the race to the title, they will have to put on an intractable image at their home ground at the Stade de France.”

I saw this in the original of a German-to-English translation project: “Fahren am Arbeitsplatz”, translating it as “Driving at Work” (rather than “Driving at the workplace”) in the English version. But it wouldn’t have been likely that I would have thought of the more appropriate “driving at work” had I not already seen it translated into English in the original!
German original: “Wir kümmern uns um die Begleitung, Bewachung und Übergabe Ihrer Fracht an den Empfänger”
English translation: “We take care of the monitoring and surveillance of your cargo and its delivery to the consignee”.
Here, “Begleitung” is better translated as “monitoring” rather than “accompaniment” of something.

But the project that is most in my mind as far as this is concerned is a German to English one in which it was said that I mistranslated “Pauschalspesen” as “allowance expenses” when it should have been “fixed expenses”, along with a few other small things. Like I told them: “ ‘fixed expenses’ was too elusive – I thought ‘allowance expenses’ was a well-informed answer even if it wasn’t correct.”