The moral fibre of a good translator

ON THE MORAL FIBRE OF A GOOD TRANSLATOR

Foreword: see also my blog called “Arguing the existence of the moral side of proper translation” dated 5th March 2016.

I have become convinced that those who would call themselves professional translators should be expected to prove themselves morally where possible, although exactly what I mean by this is most likely only too elusive a subject for just about anyone. (I do hope that doesn’t make me sound mocking of those who don’t / can’t do what I do.) Of course it’s easy enough to argue that an unwise choice of words in a translation, depending on the particulars of the circumstance in question, could be traced back to the translator getting momentarily subconsciously carried away by their own subjective response to… well, something that only really has any significance to them personally; something which only really exists inside their head (in their imaginary comfort zone / “safe space”?) rather than in the world of corporeal reality. Memories about things, however trivial what they may be about may be, do have what it takes to decide our destiny if they are well entrenched enough… and we keep on and on acting by the relevant unspoken rules – Dr. Phil, who wrote Self Matters, would surely agree with me there i.e. the term “defining moments” in that book. That said, I would advise against letting wishful thinkers become top level professional translators: put simply, if you’re too emotionally attached to what (you believe) makes sense only to you personally to appreciate just the very truth that’s afoot in reality, readily articulated or not, it’s only too much of a reason to believe that – especially if what you’re translating is complex – people’s confidence in your work would be undermined. After all, choice of words and phrases is shaped emotionally and psychologically as well as intellectually, whether we want to admit it or not. And if the likes of the Insane Clown Posse are capable of appreciating the unadulterated truth of the real world – at least, if this song of theirs is anything to go by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs – why can’t we all? Consider this question: how many people who actually do, to their credit, have good reasons to call themselves “good” translators, really would feel comfortable translating, say, a confidential psychiatric report?

When I speak of the moral fibre of a good translator, I refer mainly to the need of the translator to attempt to acquaint themselves with someone else’s mentality even if the latter themselves may not be acquainted with certain aspects of it, even if – and I’m only saying if – it is just about purely in hypotheticals.

I am only being honest here. I am a professional translator, and as a professional translator I am a bona fide professional linguist, and as a bona fide professional linguist I will declare that it’s only too easy for me to believe that the average person is more inclined to define the meaning of individual words based on proverbs to do with them, or just intangible personal experiences, rather than provable dictionary definitions of them. And while I sometimes feel the need to ask my clients questions in connection with work I have done for them, I would say that they should never be rhetorical questions, lest they lose confidence in me. Which brings me to my next point.

You know the phrase, “Those who can’t, teach”? If that’s true, then, having been a self-employed translator for eight and a half years, there’s surely no doubt that I have succeeded as one of the “top league” linguists in society: one of “those who can” in the field of languages-related work, generally capable of coping with the biggest / toughest language-related challenges imaginable (or unimaginable!) at least to a certain extent, and I’m very proud to be a self-employed translator rather than just good enough at languages to teach them (whether this includes how to translate or not). By the way, please don’t assume that I believe that teaching is (or even could be) always easy and straightforward by any means. To me, just because one is popular, passionate, committed or even respected as a teacher doesn’t preclude them from, through some honest mistake, teaching a student something which is not right (even if there’s good reason to believe otherwise) – or maybe the fault behind the false taught thing lies in the psyche of the student through no fault of their own – with both the teacher and the student not knowing the truth and maybe they never will. Either way, for the sake of earnest appreciation of what I myself do: whatever memorable teacher-student stories / histories you could recall and discuss, if “those who can” can’t be trusted to confront the toughest, most awkward, most difficult-to-explain challenges in what they do literally NO MATTER WHAT… who can? So you see, for all my natural talent for and love of languages, I must always resist any temptation to be too insouciant in my work as a professional translator however much I manage to expand my job-related comfort zone (even if it is at no-one else’s expense) – certainly when paying customers depend on me, and it’s not like I have any business arguing with them how big of a deal they should regard the translation projects they give me, and what really does and doesn’t matter in them.

In short, while I have bought the idea that translation is an art, one could say that art doesn’t have to make sense in absolute terms to please, inspire, whatever – “do its job” (at least apparently / so to speak)… but the same cannot be said of translation work. In broad terms, this argument could be defined thus: when you’re translating, you should make a point of resolving to account for… well, “what is happening even though it isn’t”, or more comprehensively defined as things other than what incontrovertibly are happening in the real world – i.e. only inside your head – while steering clear of being pre-occupied with it excessively as if there were always some big life-changing secret within. These things may be accepted as the basis of one’s general attitudes in life. In my work I am certainly on my guard against taking apparitions / random illustrations of abstract thought in my head at face value too soon, if that makes sense. (Take a moment to look up “open mind”.) But, for the sake of clarification, one could be forgiven for thinking that a lot of people (certainly young people), when they have sex, without going into unnecessary detail, are only too inclined to stimulate the carnal pleasure of themselves and their partner(s) and savour the orgasmic ecstasy of whatever “world” they are temporarily in, and only that, to allow for a proper intellectual appreciation of what is (or should that be “happens to be”?) taking place in their head – even though they may call what they are doing “exploring their sexuality” – but even porn stars will tell you that the most powerful sexual organ is the brain (remember Heather Graham in the film The Guru).

And that is what I mean by the moral fibre of a good translator. You know, do we always need to be pre-occupied with the potential discovery of some amazing elusive secret to something, which may not even exist? Is to compulsively insist that we could never forget how to do certain things which we would never normally do, to dismiss our broader potential? Is it enough to point out that such insisting in itself has nothing to offer us? To me, the answer is no – I mean, when assessing morals, what do / would you use as criteria? Put simply, what we don’t do is as much a part of who we are as what we do do, and it’s not just ourselves we make suffer when we fail to do certain things; depending on the scenario / facts, it is enough to raise questions about our morality. And morality is certainly something that people pray for in professionals; certainly if they were afraid of being ripped off, do you know what I mean? That said: even intelligent people can end up making mistakes in their translation work which should be accepted as embarrassing if the truth is that they failed to be “switched on” enough.

Just how much more important is my own “exclusive” knowledge than anyone else’s anyway? That’s right, it is no more important than anyone else’s at all! I stand ready to defy my imagination for the sake of success in my job – or for what is right in it, at the very least.

What follows should serve as a case study regarding what I mean regarding the question of the moral fibre of a good translator. As part of a marketing stunt, I pretended to have a Swedish girlfriend while entertaining the idea that I had taken up learning Swedish just so that we could have private conversations in public (sound romantic?). And so I wrote a love letter to “Stina”, and paid an English-to-Swedish translator to translate it into Swedish. I hope the material wasn’t too challenging for the person who did it, but I hope you can understand that I expected them to do more than just a “good” job of it – this is supposed to be understood as a case of the question of the moral fibre of the professional translator. The original and translation of it are below:

ORIGINAL

Dear Stina,

To say that I couldn’t wait to write you this would be probably the biggest understatement I’ve ever made in my life. No – definitely the biggest understatement I’ve ever made in my life. It’s been too long – but any amount of time would have been too long.

You are the most beautiful and amazing girl I have ever met in my life, and I love you. You’re the silver bullet which never ceases to elevate my mood in a virtually magical way – all it takes is that I think about you. Whether you happen to be smiling or not in my random thoughts of you, it’s not so much a breath of fresh air as a breath of the air of an emotional hurricane of joy that I am caught up in the middle of every time – but this hurricane will never be loud enough to drown out my words of my true feelings for you. You may sweep me off my feet, but the hurricane never will.

You really do captivate me just by smiling at me or holding my hand, and I wish I had your head resting over my shoulder right now with the only sound being that of our quiet breathing, marked by deeply contented sighs.

It’s not enough to say that you make me excited in a way I’ve never been before. It’s always accompanied by feelings of being powerful, confident and in control in a way that I actually realised long ago will never deteriorate. And if I could make you as relaxed yet remarkably invigorated as you make me, I would almost certainly find myself throwing my head back as I instantaneously laugh out loud with you. Whatever’s happening inside me right now, I can feel my shyness in your presence slipping away as I find myself becoming someone I have never dreamed of being. I want to learn more about your secrets. And every time it feels like I’m prepared to relinquish something I understand about myself if that’s the price to pay for understanding something about you (if I could), I remember how much I want to take you in my arms, look deep into your eyes, kiss you passionately and rock your world.

I want you to say yes not just to all the things you habitually appreciate, but to the extraordinary. Leave your doubt and apprehension behind, because make no mistake: you absolutely deserve the extraordinary, and the best thing (for both of us) is that this is no dream. We can experience our own idea of Heaven on Earth together if you will just embrace what I think, what I do, what I feel… in short, me. When you’re ready…

Bye for now, my angel,
George

SWEDISH TRANSLATION

Kära Stina,

Att säga att jag inte kunde vänta med att skriva till dig skulle troligtvis vara den största underdrift jag har gjort i mitt liv. Nej- defintivt den största underdrift jag har gjort någonsin har gjort. Det har gått för lång tid – men hur lång tid som än gått hade varit för lång.
Du är den vackraste och mest fantastiska tjej jag någonsin har träffat i mitt liv, och jag älskar dig. Du är silverkulan som alltid får mig på bra humör, på ett virituellt och magiskt sätt – allt jag behöver göra är att tänka på dig. Vare sig du ler eller inte i mina slumpmässiga tankar på dig, så är det inte bara ett andetag av frisk luft utan ett andetag av en storm med känslor av glädje varje gång – men den här orkanen är inte så högljudd att den kan dränka mina ord om de äkta känslorna jag känner för dig. Du kan ta mig med storm, men det kan inte orkanen.
Du fångar mig verkligen bara genom ditt leende och när du håller min hand, och jag önskar att jag hade ditt huvud vilande mot min axel just nu och det enda som hörs är våra tysta andetag och våra djupa, nöjda suckar.
Det räcker inte med att säga att du gör mig uppspelt på ett sätt jag har aldrig har varit förut. Samtidigt som jag alltid känner mig stark, självsäker och att jag har kontroll, på ett sätt som jag insåg för längesedan, aldrig kommer att försämras. Och om jag kunde göra dig lika avslappnad men ändå, anmärkningsvärt uppfriskande, som du får mig att känna, skulle jag skulle kasta mitt huvud bakåt samtidigt som jag skulle direkt börja skratta tillsammans med dig. Vad som än händer inom mig just nu så kan jag känna att min blyghet i din närvaro försvinner samtidigt som jag blir någon jag aldrig har drömt om att bli. Jag vill veta mer om dina hemligheter. Och varje gång känns det som om att jag kan avstå någonting som jag förstår om mig själv om det är priset för att få förstå någonting om dig (om jag kunde), jag kom att tänka på hur mycket jag vill hålla om dig, titta dig djupt i ögonen, kyssa dig passionerat och rocka din värld.
Jag vill att inte att du säger ja till alla saker som du vanligtvis uppskattar, men också till saker som är utöver det vanliga. Lämna dina tvivel och det du känner dig orolig över bakom dig, därför att helt säkert: du förtjänar verkligen något extra och det bästa (för oss båda) är att det här inte är en dröm. Vi kan uppleva vår egen idé om himmelriket på jorden tillsammans om du bara kan ta emot vad jag tycker, vad jag gör, vad jag känner.. helt kort. När du är redo…
Farväl för nu, min ängel,
George

(with thanks to Madde Åhlin madde.ahlin@hotmail.com)

Was it a “good” translation – both technically and morally? Too bad I’ll never know (unless, of course, I actually start learning Swedish).