One person who has recently offered to connect with me on LinkedIn is Susana Hourbeigt, whose profile lists her as a “Personal Assistant to Bemberg Group President” in Argentina. According to her background, she actually a completed a postgraduate degree in “reverse translation” in 2007… so what is that all about?
Maybe she’s become particularly accomplished at translating FROM her mother tongue (Spanish) rather than to it, in which case good for her. (By the way, I can promise that I have done professional translation work from English into French and German before; but rest assured that I do try to avoid taking my chances.) Or maybe it’s a concept born out of taking on more challenging translation work, where the person doing it, even if they have proven themselves for translation talent, fully agrees that getting it right is going to be a frustrating experience at nearly every turn and they think that sometimes they will just need to have to find a non-straightforward and unusual (if carefully considered) solution and hope for the best. Maybe “reverse translation” is something that is meant to address more elusive translation concepts, like getting the terminology right. Having said that, even today I wonder whether or not I have commented on correct terminology in the field of translation as much and definitively as I can – I feel I should be doing this, at least, considering that I am a self-employed translator.
These days I note two different kinds of “literal translation”. The first is the obvious kind, like with that English sign in a French hotel next to a lift in it which was no doubt written by a French person, for what it read was, “Persons ignorant of the maneuvers of the ascenseur are prayed to address themselves to the concierge” – in proper English, what is meant here is, “Persons who don’t understand how the lift works should ask the concierge”, and I know this because I speak French well enough that I could work out the French that the English used in the sign was based on, it was something like: “Personnes qui sont ignorantes des manoeuvres de l’ascenseur sont priées de s’adresser au concierge”. This purely speculated French does “make sense to me” in that I have understood it correctly, so to speak, even if it is not the kind of French that I would use myself, but then that shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
And the second kind of “literal translation” is the sort that readers more contrive to find. I’ll provide an example of this kind later.
It is based on this that I’m going to be writing about proper terminology again in this article, referring to two recent translation projects I have done.
The first translation project in question was an accident report, from French to English. One section heading in the original material read, “Présentation de l’entreprise”, and in my translation I wrote, “Presentation of the company” for it. Now, to me, although this works quite well, I really should have put “Description of the company”, as true as it is that when native speakers of English hear the word “presentation” in English, what they think of is usually rather different compared to what they think when they hear the word “description” in English. And I would regard both as commonly used words – certainly more common than jargon and all that. After all, to me, out of context, if one read “Presentation of the company” in my translation here without looking at the rest of the document, they’d probably guess that it was more like advertising of said company rather than the accident report that this project was. Does this make sense?
The second of these translation projects was a medical report, from German to English. I kept seeing the word “auffällig” in the original – I have seen the same word more than once in other German medical reports just like this one. It pertains to investigation of the patient and a common translation of it in English is “inconspicuous”, as in “inconspicuous findings” / “nothing irregular noted”. But I recently started believing that my use of the word “inconspicuous” as my translation of “auffällig” in writing my English version of such material would be taken by some as a “literal translation”. I’ve started viewing “inconspicuous” as the translated word for “auffällig” as seen in German medical reports, as an example of the second kind of “literal translation” mentioned above. So what do I put as my translation of “auffällig” in this context? Strangely enough, it’s not even an alternative adjective, but rather “no findings” or anything that fits around that.
I feel like saying that this article went on longer than I thought. Then again, as far as I’m concerned, I can’t afford not to be thorough when I do a professional translation project. And that’s why I’m ending thus: is the sentence, “The following diagram provides a good explanation” a complete or an incomplete sentence?