Foreword: read the title again and consider the importance of such a deliberately implied
hypothetical imperative in relation to translation work. Just saying.
The subject of this article requires that some context be provided, so here it is. The image
provided is a scanned part of a copy of the Fighting Fantasy gamebook “The Citadel of
Chaos”, Elsevier Gringlewald being supplied as one of the three ready-made options, or
suggestions, for exactly who one may play as when going through such an adventure offered
only by this book. Truth be told, it’s but an offhand and idle suggestion on the part of the
people who wrote it (as opposed to the situation that you have to play as one of these three
characters with their particular statistics and inventory as listed), and I speak as someone who
has played many of the gamebooks in this series and loved every moment of it (kudos to
Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone). Not that that point has any significance here.
Anyway: back to life, back to reality…
I am a professional translator – at least, I claim as such, and I am welcome to any challenge
of dealing with any comments that just might impugn that (justified or not). Remember the
title of this article. Consider the sentence in this image that I demarcated in red; I did it for a
reason. And I hereby comment on it:
Having read it, I soon realised that I was fascinated as to the finer points of how it would (or
just might or could) end up translated in foreign languages I speak fluently (and, for what it’s
worth, foreign languages I don’t speak fluently). And one part of it – which is far from a
small one – is to do with the otherwise unmentioned debate of what a person would get the
impression of, and believe they realise (or fail to; whether consciously or unconsciously), as
to the question of the facts of whatever situation it can be related to. In other words, not just
simply stating “this happened” and “that happened”, even if you could prove it all beyond
any reasonable doubt. When I say “ ‘can’ be related to”, I know I mean to imply “not
necessarily ‘should’ ” – indeed, events can be related to multiple random situations of any
kind; but of course, these are fictional events and anything can happen in fiction (that said,
fantasy fiction in particular). If Murphy’s law is “Anything that can go wrong, will go
wrong”, then my rule of fantasy is “Anything that can go right, will go right” i.e. from the
standpoint of any given fantasy’s creator.
Now for the output of this little exercise that I did. My love of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks
aside, this single sentence just “provoked” my imagination, and “provoked” me into thinking
a number of questions, much as I realise that they are questions that no-one could ever
answer definitively (unless, of course, you actually made Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone
make something up just so that that could become possible). One of these is, “Well, yes, [if
we’re talking about this guy from the perspective of his personal history], so now I
understand that he was thrown out of his home before training as a wizard, and not after”.
Another one: was his stepfather abusive – I couldn’t blame anyone for arriving at that
conclusion – or just “unpleasant”? The comma after the word “stepfather” (to me, at least)
suggests that his stepfather most certainly did not specifically have plans for him to start
training as a wizard when he threw him out of home (I would say “but I could be wrong”, but
again, we’re talking about events that never actually happened and were – obviously – never
even given sufficient attentiveness by the authors for one to be able to deduce an answer to
that conundrum even within the realm of this piece of fiction itself). In which case
[admittedly out of empathy for someone who doesn’t exist and was never meant to]: “Well,
good for him to resolve to take up training as a wizard after having been thrown out of home
by his unpleasant stepfather and, apparently, truly succeed at it.” By the way, it says that
Elsevier was a conman and a thief at whatever points in his past, which begs the question:
how much was his criminal life a part of the motivation of his stepfather throwing him out?