A myth about psychology

A MYTH ABOUT PSYCHOLOGY PLUS THE TRANSLATION-RELATED REALM OF WHERE “CORRECT” ISN’T “CORRECT”

Everyone knows that you can study psychology (you can certainly take university courses in it, at any rate). However, the most ignorant of us may suggest that a knowledge of psychology is only good for anyone who wants to become a psychologist (which is not the same as a psychiatrist, by the way). Of course that’s a myth. It’s a very important asset in police work, for example (not to mention criminal fare – certainly fraud). And you must know that talk show hosts, like Jeremy Kyle, couldn’t function without it. And I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that it’s important in translation work. After all, having assumed the position of professional translator, I’ve joined the ranks of people for whom this statement applies whether we like it or not: “if I can’t be trusted to provide a solution that works / is reliable in the realm of translation, surely no-one can, right?”

So from that perspective it’s probably no surprise that people offer translation courses at university: specifically, instruction on how to translate. I can’t emphasise enough the importance of practice in such courses – it’s not as if language never changes, at any rate. (Did you know that French began life as a bastardised version of Latin?) What I mean to say here is that it definitely should not be pure theory. Which has made me arrive at this dilemma: is there a psychology of initiative and / or a way to teach psychology that fosters a capacity for initiative? Consider what well-known Youtube atheist comedian Pat Condell says in his video “Free speech on campus”: “Even somebody like me knows that the primary purpose of an education is to teach a person to develop an inquiring mind – to be willing to engage with new ideas and information, and to think for themselves.”

One thing is for sure: every single person ever will be proud of what effectively constitutes their (strictly non-opportunistic) knowledge (or rather, reasoning) of psychology (kind of like the opposite end of the spectrum from compulsive excuse mentality). Actually, they might, if they start to realise that their behaviours manifested by nothing other than their own psychology have started to take their toll on their conscience. (Maybe I should study Freud in depth.) And when they start to become afraid of it? …now that’s a definition of insanity. So what sort of guidelines are to be recommended for learning and appropriating the proper psychological authority that is necessary for appropriate translation? Seriously, if you really do care about pleasing your clients as a professional translator, you have to be honest about how prescriptive these people can be as far as the right terms are concerned, or what kind of psychological manifestation may result from someone else reading the words you choose (or, indeed, don’t “choose” i.e. subconsciously) to use in your translation product; which, admittedly, is no less likely to be grounded in one’s “inner world” and / or rationality than it is in the real world and the realm of rationality. Of course, I’m not saying I think of everything – I’m not perfect – but boy, have I ever been tempted to suggest that I could get all the adventure I need from within (depending on the circumstances)!

The next time you attempt a translation, ask yourself this: is it (i.e. what you put forward as your translation) really correct if it’s only “correct” (this may be like as opposed to “clearly incorrect” or as opposed to “subtly misleading”). After all, who’s going to agree with confidence that that which is “de facto correct” can be trusted unconditionally?

I want to share with you a joke: “My teacher kept saying that my writing needed to be ‘more spaced out.’ So I took some acid, and wrote about a time-travelling tartan-skinned, turquoise & ginger haired naked Japanese schoolgirl with three tits, who then swam in a giant inverted tetrahedron pyramid-shaped teacup full of butter, spinach and cherries with a talking half-unicorn, half dung-beetle that had teleported from the planet LembitOpik 69.”

You can only wonder – and indeed ONLY wonder – where such bizarre (to say the least) imagination came from (at least, I actually don’t believe that the author was high at the time that he or she created this joke; like Jon Lajoie’s work “High as Fuck”) – then again, I kind of lost track of the imagery of it all before the description of it all was even completed. Maybe trying to illustrate it would help. But I dare to state (publicly, apparently) that I am prepared to resolutely acquaint myself with literally any and all kinds of imagination for the purpose of improving my knowledge, awareness and just general status as a translator. You really do have to wonder what people can only imagine when they put their mind to it, compared with the general scope of what people can just end up thinking of, compared to what is undeniably beyond the imagination of some, compared to imagination which “while meant for me, is just not meant for everyone” and… well, blah blah blah. And this is coming from someone who is most proud of their articulacy, for reasons which I would expect people to appreciate are obvious when I’m a professional translator and, as such, if nothing else, have a role whereby I am essentially supposed to let people understand – even if sometimes it can feel more like “MAKE people understand”, without actual coercive threats. I assure you that I have heard of the saying, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” But it does seem to me that people can underestimate their capability for sounding like they know what they’re talking about even if they don’t really want to know what they’re talking about and may even be afraid to.

To render a message from one language, in another, with accuracy and the right senses captured, of course, all things considered… there are many things that I could say about the work that I do but I now fully accept that one of them is that, when you’re translating something, it can really scramble your mind to think that a translation of something that you are creating is both “right” and “wrong”… I mean, it may well be written in genuinely articulate wording in the target language but for one or two expressions that are just used out of context in that they would sound highly peculiar (at best) to native speakers… maybe it’s too easy for me to say this, maybe it isn’t, but I specifically chose not to say here that it “should” rather than “would” (or, indeed, “shouldn’t”, depending on how you look at it!) sound too peculiar to native speakers. If I wanted to assist people in their understanding of what I mean by this, I suppose I would look for a sound way to get them to put themselves in my position. But I would suggest that it be paralleled with the concept of being (or just feeling) pressured into talking about something that you don’t really know anything about, or as much as you

at 06:51, the guy – who, by the way, I agree doesn’t have his head screwed on – says that there is no wrong way sign in the Highway Code while seemingly entirely overlooking the fact that the “No entry sign” effectively serves as a wrong way sign by default (or is that just me?); but then, when you think about it, what sort of illustration would serve as a “wrong way” message? A big black cross? A big arrow pointing downwards, like in the “Give way to oncoming vehicles” sign? One thing is for sure: if I ever saw the words “This is the wrong way” on a road sign, I would be pretty much be torn between hopeless confusion and outright laughter (or genuine ridicule, depending on your point of view), for at the end of the day, when you think about it, the one and only prominent question in anyone’s eyes would be: “What is meant by ‘wrong’ way?”

Of course, the reason I write these comments is to promote myself as a translator, and this surely involves doing what is necessary to position myself, being well-known for being a naturally talented linguist as I am, as an authority on language and translation. And as such, I say this: I recently thought of inventing an expression which you add immediately after describing something that happened in the past; what this expression essentially signifies is basically, “I couldn’t elucidate it as such back then, but I can now” i.e. it might have been, say, an event which made you uncomfortable back then but you were unable to explain why, but you can explain why now, as you indeed have just done; you specifically don’t just want the listener / reader to know only of the certain event in the past in question; you consider it important to mention specifically that you couldn’t have described e.g. what you felt in connection with it, such as you have just described it now, back then. I say that to say this: I envision that, when such an expression is invented and spread, some of those who learn of it would agree, in independent thought, like: “Hey, this is an expression that is capable of providing people hope – certainly from a psychological standpoint. For example, it would help people to become more attuned with the reasons why they do what they do in that it would be the first step to helping people identify why they are, say, burdened by guilt when they in truth have nothing to be guilty about.” (The study of psychology, indeed.)

And I really do think that all these work-related anecdotes that I keep posting at the end of these comments revolve around the domain of psychology to a certain extent – look at this one: a quote taken from a job I did where I did a French-to-English translation of an article which describes Romeo and Juliet, and which is supposed to support claims of how my psychological profile is fit for translation purposes: “La trame est connue de tous : une histoire d’amour impossible entre les enfants de deux familles qui se détestent” – “Everyone knows the plot: a story of forbidden love between the children of two families who hate each other.”