TAKING ON THE SO-CALLED “NON-NORMAL” CHALLENGES OF TRANSLATION
Admittedly, “Taking on the so-called ‘non-normal’ challenges of translation” is a vague-sounding label for a concept, and no less vague-sounding as a title for a professional translation blog, such as this is supposed to be. I thought of defining it as “reckoning with possibilities of reality with no precedent” – in other words, not just “the likes of which you’ve never seen before, but which hardly anyone, if anyone, has ever seen before”. But then, I can believe that most people eventually come to realise – or, indeed, remember – that not all claims about things, and not even all impressions about things (even if they stem wholly from direct memories about them) are rooted in an appreciation of what is real – it’s only a matter of when. If I were wrong about that in the real world, I would be very confident that it would leave me disturbed.
You know, I recently saw the trailer for the new Jason Bourne movie, in which Matt Damon says “I remember everything now”, but then there’s a bit where one female character says to him, “Just because you remember everything doesn’t mean you know everything.” In my book, no wiser words have ever been spoken. Living a lifetime ashamed and afraid of your memories through no fault of your own is a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. And it would appear that the translator who is hungry for more status and power will, inevitably, always be yearning to realise self-validating facts if it helps to produce translation work which is correct and reliable and can be trusted no matter what. These are facts which, ironically, have nothing to do with sensitivities or cultural priorities as such i.e. even though aspects of language (in its standard form) are most often born not of the individual but of the consensus of society. After all, “real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance” (Confucius). If you’re going to get afraid of and / or angry at anything, let it be your ignorance – my own ignorance would certainly only harm my business prospects.
Now, some people can do brilliant and usually instantly appealing things as masterfully and confidently as anyone who was born in the United Kingdom, like me, can speak English (much as I appreciate that we simply won’t speak exactly the same). A gymnast can do backflips, for example – imagine being the first person to accomplish that! A master chef may know gourmet recipes off by heart, and associate a certain kind of personal prestige with it. But it could quite easily also be something categorised as everyday “boring” standard stuff; it could quite easily be something that’s NOT normally only done “for show”, certainly if it’s a habitual thing practiced in one’s everyday life. And yet we never know exactly when or how we will next need to rely on our English language skills (with actual hope and faith) when it’s difficult to believe that anything could work as a substitute for them. Myself, I can undoubtedly speak good French and German as well as English, but even today, for all my prowess and history in it… all my skills in these languages, however fertile it may be as a conversation subject, are just not something I can always take for granted. Indeed, just because I can speak French and German well doesn’t mean I’m going to claim that I know “most” words in these languages. I’m not even going to claim that I know “most” words in my mother tongue, English. It was Derek Walcott, the Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist, who said “The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.”
Language indeed changes and is seldom uniform for everyone. How nice that I learned of this Thought for the Day article from BBC Radio Fourhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03qpryb
At the end of the day, it’s good to identify things. I do mean real “identifying things” i.e. as / for what they are, and not just what they’re not. It makes you feel smart. Especially when they don’t actually exist yet (in practice). In a way, it doesn’t just help you to learn; it’s a part of growing up. And even though becoming a self-employed translator was the best decision I made in my life – and I subsequently am very much in touch with who I really am and live a relatively satisfying life which reflects it – sometimes it’s still easier for me to talk about who I “should” be rather than who I really am, which, in all candour, really is capable of leaving me unsettled and intimidated.
But about translation, my job and living. When I’m undertaking translation assignments: my work is full of challenges when it comes to producing a proper and working translation from what I’m reading in the original. When I say “challenges”, most of the time they’re things that would definitely be accepted as challenges by people who don’t have the language talent I do even if it’s a “challenge” that I can overcome pretty easily as long as I apply the right kind of thinking – sometimes it’s “typical fare” thinking, sometimes not.
But one may wonder how anyone whose mother tongue is not English would translate something like barely comprehensible chav-speak, like this:
“oi init bruvv, got my 4 by 4 ravers and bass line skankers init sket. we goin to blow this place out wicked blud. ahhh mate thats well dog has it bluddd oi lets sketchit yo ay and hit the legs this is well waffle munter bruv.”
…into their own language while retaining the would-be authenticity of it, or with the application of any linguistic devices that utilise aspects of an idiolect which everyone just knows is not spoken by everyone, but rather people who knowingly classify themselves as separate from the norm of the average person in society at large in some way as a result of what they do or think (whether they admit – or believe – it or not). With non-normal challenges like this in translation work, aren’t you just originally overwhelmed and not knowing what to think other than how confusing it is, only to think: just what in God’s name could be the story behind anything like this?
If we’re going to look at ideas for tackling this sort of thing: starting by trying to categorise anything and quite possibly everything in any commonly known existing way won’t help. Think about it. And while we can all explore our own inner world fully without delay or hindrance at any time, deep down we usually know what to expect; but we don’t usually believe that we could find it easy to explain the abnormal properly even if we were everything we wanted to be and probably more. It may frighten us… but in translation, words are words. But however much you may think I think of translation as a game, it’s not all entirely fun and joy, as if I really needed to point that out.
Oh yes, we are inclined to avoid abnormal things which have no place in our mentality or mindset as we know it. (By the way: Google defines “abnormal” as “deviating from what is normal or usual, typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying.”.) And that’s perfectly understandable. After all, it tends to trigger psychological upheaval from the subconscious until we’re simply not the same person. Look at paedophilia. I could not explain why some people are sexually attracted to children, but then again, how could we hope to coax anyone into admitting that they were if they were, for reasons best known to themselves (or maybe they don’t know the reasons, which would only make the matter – and I use this word with great trepidation – engrossing)? I know, I know; it’s abnormal – and evil – behaviour, of course it is. That said, mind, I do agree that sex is sometimes used as an instrument of domination; but it’s not like I am not concerned about what people will think about me if I simply came across as too eager (in a morbid sense) to discuss something so… well, wrong, disturbing and criminal here. But, for the sake of showing that I have a modicum of sensitivity (and responsibility) and don’t want to trivialise anything, I do accept that inappropriate sexual contact with a child is a choice – in all likeliness a choice characterised by some kind of warped enthusiasm for something which has been tacitly (and certainly shamefully) mislabeled as something to be encouraged or rewarded rather than discouraged and denounced – who’s to say whether these reasons lie more with the rapist or with the child (in the paedophile’s mind) in any individual case. One thing that really doesn’t help alleviate the emotional temperature that is, inevitably, universally recognised with the subject, is that today’s teenagers are more sexualised than ever, and I’m sure today’s paedophiles have noted that very well. But, supposing I wasn’t the person I am today, and actually did – surely for reasons which really should be in violation of my better judgement – have such askew inclinations which most people simply couldn’t bring themselves to discuss… I know I WOULD know better than to actually “make a move on”, say, a ten-year-old girl who’s fond of experimenting with make-up (hello, psychiatrists and police. Please, don’t worry. I solemnly swear that I do know better, and like everyone else, there are some lines I will NEVER cross, no matter what.). It’s simply not something that one will openly relish or celebrate under any circumstances; not least because, at some level, she’s actually being encouraged to play the role of a silent victim, do you know what I mean? There wouldn’t be any kind of consent on her part revolving around anything which would be any more likely to reinforce a sense of well-being than to undermine it – I mean, having someone believe that they “should be” something as part of the pursuit of something that is morally wrong is one thing, but having them believe that they “are” something as part of something morally wrong is a lot more detrimental and nauseating, because it’s more insidious i.e. once they start to buy into otherwise unstated lies. And probably end up a pawn which sustains an agenda that is morally wrong, of course. Personally, without anyone getting upset, I think that that’s very likely to induce insanity, certainly among the more naïve. Like I said earlier, living a lifetime ashamed and afraid of your memories through no fault of your own is a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. But, to a paedophile, would that even factor into the equation if they were more concerned with, say, defying the constraints which exist as a result of conscience as they proceeded to rape a child and / or use him or her in a porn film and probably make money off of it on the dark web? And for what!? No-one should be prepared to try something like that for hormonal highs or discovering new sources of ego-driven wry pleasure, do you know what I mean? Anyway, just as paedophiles try to work with things which have purely imagined characteristics and merits in the pursuit of sub-human pleasure, when I’m translating, I do have my limits which I can be reluctant to acknowledge, let alone discuss, when it comes to dealing with text in the original with elements that are non-existent or just rooted in something that is, for lack of a better word, improper – maybe they are there entirely because of my own imagination – and usually simply aren’t “meant to” “be there” either.
Now, as someone who translates for a living, I regard myself as someone expected to defy the limits of reason related to words used in verbal communication (who else would? Or could?). I don’t like the idea of being stuck in any kind of habit where pretty much everything I say about something is things that it’s too easy for me to say – even if it’s true – after a while it starts to sound less authentic (not to mention the fact that doing it too much would suggest something negative – if, most likely, indefinite – about me). And my job is essentially one of writing texts which I know people will rely on wholly – texts for their benefit and not mine. In one recent German-to-English translation project I nearly translated “Geschäftszahl” as “business number”, which is hardly a stupid idea (depending on the context of course), but at the end of the day I went with “reference number.” Now “reference number” isn’t really jargon but I did get to thinking that this was worth treating as a case of (successful) use of correct terminology rather than just a matter of preferred / standardised choice because one person said so.
But I have become especially averse to / on my guard against misinterpretations and false ideas in communication in general. Just because there’s such a thing as “waking up” doesn’t mean that there’s such a thing as “waking down”. But I want to impart an actual example from my own life. There have been times when I have accepted a translation project with what I at the time called an “irrevocable” deadline, meaning that the deadline could not be extended under any circumstances – this was pointed out to me at the start, before I accepted the project. But suppose I mentioned to someone that a deadline for a given translation project was “irrevocable” and, not knowing what “irrevocable” meant, they asked me what I meant and I explained to them that it meant that the deadline could not be extended; would they end up thinking that the word “irrevocable” quite simply has the definition: “something that cannot be extended”? Because that is not a completely accurate definition of the word.
To admit that “you’re done” with something can be interpreted as an open admission that you have fully given up trying to come to terms with it, and in the worst case scenario would start to develop early feelings of personal helplessness, and quite possibly impatience / annoyance with those who insisted that you do so anyway (although whether or not you would rather dismiss it from your life entirely is another subject). Such is the importance of an open mind, if I’m not mistaken.
How used are you to handling moments of madness? Someone should ask Katie Melua that – she has a song called “A Moment Of Madness”, doesn’t she? Anyway, at the very least, like most people, I aim to continue to act normal (or should that be “normally”?) on principle, for the greater good – I certainly wouldn’t want to know that it’s not the damning truth that I mostly try to achieve this “somehow”. But who’s going to argue that sustaining patterns of normal reasoning was and always will be a part of managing this successfully (and not just when in professional translation work)?
YO! I’M A GANGSTA RAPPER FROM THE SHAOLIN TEMPLE! SUP, HOMIE? CHECK DIS, YO! DRAGON FIST! YAH! YAH! HIIYAAAHHHH! FO’ SHEEZY! AND PEEP DIS, CUZ I CAN DO A KICKFLIP ON A SK8BOARD STR8 IN2 A SMITH GRIND WHILE PLAYING A GUITAR, YO! CUE ELECTRIC GUITAR RIFFS. No, not really, of course I’m not, and of course I can’t. Whoever heard of a gangsta rapper at the Shaolin temple, practicing kung fu moves in an incense-scented room, anyway? Or a Shaolin monk ballin’ it on da streetz rappin’ like a badass mofo as he skins up a bifta? Or a gangsta rapper or a Shaolin monk doing a 900 on a skateboard in a halfpipe like Tony Hawk etc. etc. (ROFLMAO) No, enough with this nonsense; I’m George Trail, and I’m a very ambitious professional translator. And I claim to be as sane as anyone I’ve ever known. Having said that, as a “good man”, I’m a man of virtue and faith, with keener good intentions. And as such a person, I may be the first to realise that an insane thought about something is pretty much inevitably – in practical terms at least – accepted as better than no thought about it at all (even if it isn’t), even and perhaps especially if you can put it into terms of your own (I think of the lyrics “Got to think about something to keep from going mad” from the No Doubt song In My Head). And I know I have to keep putting things into terms of my own (both literally and figuratively) when I deal with problems in translation however bizarre they may seem – what follows is a few more work-related anecdotes (see earlier comments) which, I hope, will exemplify this:
French to English
French original: “Je trouvais que ce mode de financement collait avec l’image de l’entreprise”
English translation: “I found that this method of financing went well with the image of the business”.
I chose “business” rather than “company” at the end. Well, it was Skinoo, the company that makes that product for breast-feeding mothers.
French to English
French original: “Ci dessous, vous trouverez ce que Christophe a à dire sur son histoire”
English translation: “Below you will find what Christophe has to say about his story”
I went with “story” at the end, even though I had thought of saying (implying) “the history of the establishment of his company” (and not his history in a more general, vague sense)
French to English
French original: “Je ne me souviens pas nécessairement de grosses erreurs lors de ma campagne”
English translation: “I don’t strictly recall any substantial mistakes made during my campaign”
I went with “recall” rather than “remember”, which was my first inclination.
And that’s what I do. While I don’t see myself as any kind of amazing hardcore guitar-playing skateboard-riding kung fu rapper any time soon (wouldn’t that be great? But never mind LOL), I continue to wonder; I continue to act; I carry on…