ARGUING THE EXISTENCE OF THE MORAL SIDE OF PROPER TRANSLATION
“Western civilisation owes its civilisation to translators.” (Kelly Louis)
Really? No wonder I seem to find it so easy to delight in making a big thing of what I do for a living (certainly in my professional translator blogs, of which this is my latest)! Besides, when I’m not addressing my marketing campaigns, sending invoices or chasing debts, my work doesn’t really entail anything other than, in practice, receiving translation assignments online, writing a working version of them in another language and sending them back (possibly with the need to deal with customers’ subsequent feedback comments), so it’s probably easy to conclude that I would hardly have anything to write about; and yet I have written more than 125,000 words (yes, 125,000) of articles just like this dedicated to promoting myself for what I do. I might as well mention that I found this quote on this website: http://www.languagerealm.com/quotes/quotes2.php
But however you may respond to that, I am compelled to mention that I have travelled a lot in my life. I say this because it is well known that the more you travel, the more you get a sense and feeling for different peoples and different cultures; and different cultures are reflected in their local languages (which shouldn’t come as a surprise, really). If anything, this makes the importance of considering accuracy in translation work all the more significant. And, speaking as a professional translator, surely if anyone should be prepared to bear this in mind, it’s someone in my position! It’s just as well that I’ve been renowned as a highly talented linguist from an early age.
Oh yes, the times when I do assignments as a professional translator are definitely times when I am NOT there to express myself or “find myself” in my writing. It’s just not about me. And I don’t expect anyone to openly acknowledge that it was specifically me who wrote a given translation piece, much less guess that it was my own work (although it will be a very different story if I start doing a lot of official / sworn translations, of course. It would certainly be nice if I got qualified to do that by becoming a member of the IOL or the ITI or something). But whether or not it should be specifically said that that is too easy to say, the content just doesn’t matter, to anyone else or to me. Read on – you’ll see why.
That said, as enthusiastic and proud as I am about finding verbal solutions which work (and properly so) in the new language when I do translation work, in a sense, what I do is little more than the basic role of communicating, complete with consideration of prose register, cultural elements and the other related things that matter. And yes, of course I realise that I get called on to do it where someone else just can’t – ever ready to defy the limits of machine translation tools, of course (not to mention the foolish and spurious sense of security and comfort / ease related to their use). And that’s great – and I think I’ll mention here that there is a quote by Albert Einstein in which he said that we are all geniuses, to show I’m not too full of myself here. Go and Google it. I mean, nobody likes not being able to make themselves understood, and as far as I can see, none of us have any excuse for disputing that when we were all babies once.
And so one may be easily inclined to ask how I really “do” translation – even if there is a relatively good chance of them becoming bored as they listen to a detailed explanation of it. When people talk in everyday conversation, it’s common for them to make up a sentence as they go along i.e. saying it, hence the habit of randomly saying “like” all the time, like Valley girls do. I endeavour to avoid taking my chances doing anything like that when translating: wherever possible, in my writing of a translation product, I will make up all the words contained in the sentence that I am currently in the process of creating, whose equivalent I am currently dealing with in the original, before I start my final definitive writing of it. Although, in practice, it’s usually clause by clause, especially if individual clauses could exist as recognisable (if possibly odd-sounding) sentences by themselves. But I will still always be ready to review the whole sentence afterwards. I’m sure I could discuss how I do translation a lot more, but in the scope of this comment I’ll leave it at that (suffice to say that I’m still learning, even after all these years).
Unless you’re something like an unusually rebellious teenager possibly in need of psychiatric help, there’s a chance that you will get upset and irate at being misunderstood (which is way different from being “misunderstood”, as if I really needed to say that). And consider how serious the implications of that can be given how it’s so easy to underestimate how angry you are compared with how easy it is to underestimate how brave you are (if the latter can even exist). I’m guessing that it should be agreed that, in the worst case scenarios, it would amount to someone’s very spirit potentially ending up lost / gone, maybe forever. Or even slander – I mean, I am familiar with this notorious story: apparently the French actor Gérard Depardieu once witnessed a rape when he was a child, and someone made the mistake of essentially mistranslating “pendant son enfance, Gérard Depardieu a assisté à un viol” as “during his childhood, Gérard Depardieu assisted in a rape”. …Oops.
Hopefully the examples of work-related anecdotes (as seen in previous comments) below do a good job showing my commitment to accuracy in translation (again), but this time with a sense of moral responsibility reflected.
German original: “anerkannten Werkstaetten”
English translation: “recognised workshops” or “registered workshops”?
It’s a matter of confidence, but it’s also a matter of legitimacy, I’m guessing.
French original: “Le contrat a été bien exécuté”
English translation: “The contract was ‘well’ (i.e. professionally and diligently) executed or ‘fully’ executed, or both? If the truth is not so obvious to you – and even if it is – I would invite you to consider the consequences of possibly mistranslating it, getting it wrong – hence the idea of the moral side of the commitment to proper translation.