A sense of context

TO ALL PROFESSIONAL TRANSLATORS: GET A SENSE OF CONTEXT

When you do what I do for a living – professional translation – it’s not hard to imagine people confiding in you, the expert linguist in their entourage, to deal with whatever language-related problems or questions they could come across, whether it’s a translation task or not. It’s not hard to imagine them blindly expecting you, possibly in total ignorance, to somehow just do it all by yourself – “if not a professional linguist, then who?”

There’s discussion of how to learn and remember vocabulary in a foreign language better, for example. I can recall a few methods for doing this that I heard of back when I was still studying French and German at school; and today I have even thought of one of my own. The idea of my own is this: write out a single nonsensical never-ending passage in the foreign language which includes the first word, then the next one, then the next one, then the next one… at random points. When you read it to yourself afterwards, the individual words that you are trying to learn at the time should strike you again as soon as you read them. (Although, I guess you can use that method only if you have learned a sufficient competence of grammar and a reasonable vocabulary in the language already. It wouldn’t be very helpful to beginners.)

Even when it comes to translation, if I wanted to explain the methods I used to do it for the benefit of someone else if they wanted to improve their own translation skills, it would be up to me to be coherent about it all by myself, expecting little to no help from the listener (based on whatever feedback I got from them) to help them understand it. The most important of these methods, which I always use these days, involves marking out (in both the original and the translation as I produce it), for example, separable adverbial or subordinate clauses in one colour and then saying to myself that everything covered by that colour definitely included 100% of said clause and nothing but, and then marking out, for example, the content of the nominative of the main clause in another colour in the same way… for sometimes the only way to translate an entire sentence confidently is to do it a bit at a time, for the sake of assured confidence that you are getting it right.

But this is the point where I exhort anyone who calls himself or herself a professional translator, to get a sense of context. I choose to assert that some problems and questions in the language-related task that is translation just cannot be explained or even properly acknowledged without a proper sense of context – and at this point I strongly suggest that you take a moment to look that word up even if you think you know what it means… no matter what your position in connection with general language matters / subjects or absence thereof. You may be very glad you did at a later point in your life… I must admit that I didn’t properly know the meaning of “context” until I looked it up on Google recently, having been inspired to do so by this video on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67WWrtWvxFw Nothing – literally nothing – can substitute context, and I don’t think anyone could dispute that, and I certainly don’t think that they could impugn the idea that context is actually a “big thing” if the content of this video is anything to go by.

I say this because, in a nutshell, context determines truth – but it goes as far as mediocre subjective opinions ending up forming the basis of what is accepted as fundamental truth if they are consistently unaddressed as to their actual value over enough time… if you can make sense of out of that, it is a scary concept indeed. And, as the linked video clarifies, it is just undeniably possible for anyone to say something “out of context” i.e. something with an element of (convenient) half-truth in it, which is grounded more in their personal feelings / biases – feelings not necessarily resultant of negative personal characteristics as such i.e. blatant arrogance, cowardice, selfishness, intolerance, but still biases in all but name given the lack of objectivity – than in actual fact. In other words, assertions with elements of half-truth have no more than (most likely) overly credited personal feelings and biases as their context; personal feelings and biases whereby the one who has them never expects to actually take charge of or defend their argument with an honest attitude as part of their position on a given topic. And when something mentioned out of context in this way reaches a person who shares similar feelings / biases (whether they, or anyone else for that matter, are aware of them or not), it’s not enough to say that there is a chance that they will consume it with a tacit kind of eagerness in light of the half-truth resonating their feelings / biases; they will probably ignorantly accept the statement as something which (somehow) reflects an element of the “truth” solely based on this element of half-truth… with the result that they actually drift away from and begin to dismiss that which is the real i.e. fundamental truth of the subject matter that the statement is pertinent to.

There’s often plenty to be said about such people that they don’t already know; but what about their peers (if that is the best word for it)? I can only reason that people don’t think they do anything morally or criminally wrong when they just go ahead and consume that which qualifies as junk information (also referred to as “crap” in the video) merely because it’s so quick to resonate with their biases and meretricious tastes. (By the way, have I basically just explained what “fake news” is all about right there?) All this junk information on the Internet, and so much of it (probably all of it) freely available, and given its format, it will not perish naturally the way biological organisms do. And all those people so eager to discredit the opinions of those they disagree with, and indeed the people that they disagree with simply for holding those opinions and to undermine their reputation for it, invoking convenient half-truths as leverage in doing so wherever it strikes them that they can – never thinking for a moment that they could ever be expected to validate their own position in the argument on their own initiative with the help of something verifiable (not just hearsay)… and if they are, then they are only too quick to dismiss anything and everything that they personally would rather shun, in denial.

There will be innumerable cases throughout history of people refusing to account for the actual, plain yet bare-knuckle truth of a subject simply because “it’s not my problem”. “Is it really any of my business anyway?” These people likely absorb new pieces of junk information that resonate with them (or rather, their feelings and biases, and not their aims in life – inasmuch as they have any) ceaselessly on a regular basis, even though they may argue that they don’t take it too seriously compared with “other things”. They just don’t realise that, in this way, they psychologically participate in their own further self-distancing from the heart of things that matter. They wouldn’t know where to look for “the heart of the things that really matter”, and in all possibility couldn’t handle it if they found it. And, in the somewhat likely event that they don’t even really care about the origin of the junk information that they consume, or about whether it is true or false… what does THAT suggest about the future of society?

If nothing else, it suggests that there will be more and more people genuinely thinking (subconsciously) that it won’t matter if they are not actually familiar with the real truth about things… and yet they are more than happy to talk about these things based on ideas about them which they have no intention of taking responsibility for (“after all, they are only thoughts.”). That can only promote mass delusion and complacency.

Anyway, so it is in life in general, so it is in translation work. I just wanted to say that unfaltering commitment to the actual truth of the subject matter is important when you’re doing translation work. Thanks for reading. Bye.