ON THE DEBATE OF THE LINK BETWEEN TRANSLATION APPROACHES AND THE ELEMENT OF HUMANITY IN TRANSLATION PRACTICE
With the digital age having made information available to the public more than ever before, it can’t be that hard to find someone who’s more as less as willing to discuss approaches to translation / translation methods as I am. People discuss all elements of it you could think of and then some in online translation forums like ProZ; and maybe you’re someone who started doing the same when you happened to read a list or two of bad translations – Charlie Croker’s “Lost In Translation”, one or two foreign films with bad subtitles in your own language, videos on Youtube, whatever. But there’s just no substitute for active and perceptive human thinking in the matter – and what could be a more important ingredient for “humanity in translation” than that?
As if I really need to repeat that translation is not just replacing words in one language with words in another language. I’ve already mentioned in an earlier comment on here that you cannot pretend to learn translation and it’s by no means unlikely that it is impossible to understand certain approaches to translation without, say, a pen and paper on hand to help you understand them. I know very well that I’m afraid of having too much faith in rigid, typical and effectively automated approaches to translation work. You know, this makes me think of all the computer games I’ve played in the past: I’ve played any number of computer games during which I’ve been pretty much completely absorbed by the activity on the screen – from the Sonic the Hedgehog games to the Tekken series to Wipeout to Parappa the Rapper to all kinds of stuff on Miniclip (and still do today, to be honest) – but when I started playing Theme Park maybe I should have had a pen and paper beside me at all times, to do calculations and draft plans with, to have been “playing it properly”. What I’m trying to say is that anyone can play Tekken or Wipeout or whatever insouciantly in this way (with no regard for anything other than the gameplay) and still be reasonably confident about getting far (i.e. reaching the last levels eventually), but it’s just different with Theme Park, you know? And you can be very sure that a similarly insouciant approach will get you nowhere when it comes to understanding approaches to translation as well, especially as writing in general can be so varied in nature. Registers differ, sometimes the terminology of some subject matter requires genuine consideration; I could go on.
What kind of imagination is necessary for successful understanding of approaches to translation? Maybe to a given extent the common one of making things up – the basis of literature and lies – factors into the equation. Ditto for the kind of flexible and innovative thinking that facilitates everyday life, or which might surprise others or leave them taken aback. But I also want to point out – however loosely – the concept of “insightful-logical imagination”. Consider this: you have a blue pen in your pocket and a red pen in your hand, and you’re telling a very small child that you will place a red pen in your pocket and then take a blue one out of the same pocket. If you tell them just before you do it then this is a magic trick, like you’re making the pen change colour or just changing it into a different pen, then they will believe you. But if you don’t tell them that it’s a magic trick – i.e. that you will just place a red pen in your pocket and then take a blue one out – then they will believe you. Just understand that they will believe that a red pen will go in and a blue pen will come out whether you mention that magic is afoot or not. How I came up with that idea – not the content of it: that is the kind of imagination I am talking about.
As vague as I know this will sound, I think it’s important (or at least relatively important) that I’ve acknowledged what I’m about to say, never mind mentioning it publicly. I would say that I have found what works for me, but at the end of the day I would most likely would be foolish to regard that as the end of the matter, however confident it may make me feel (or should that be help me to, at least sometimes?).
I don’t know. But I do know that the key theme of the South Park episode Funnybot is humanity being taken out of comedy, so to speak. And, given that comedy is an art, I really wouldn’t be all that surprised if it were pointed out to me that I have been guilty of “taking the humanity out of translation” at times. And I know that, in my work as a professional translator, I write what gets the job done while accepting – with a hugely varying level of enthusiasm – that people can be more sensitive to particular choices of words or phrases, or registers, whatever, than I might initially have guessed. My point is that, if a translation may be fit for purpose and functional on a purely practical level but just sounds stilted when you read it, people will pick up on it easily. And if I developed a reputation for writing translations like that, it would probably only be a matter of time before I got a bad reputation as someone who wasn’t a real translator and who got Google Translate or whatever to do his work for him or something, do you know what I’m saying?
Here’s an example: in one French-to-English translation project I did recently, I translated “Nombre d’actions totales potentiels” as “Number of potential total shares” while feeling that I was (merely) translating in a manner that was strictly playing it by the book, with all the “fun” and humanity taken out of it; but I translated it like that anyway.
This is followed by the rest of my latest collection of these translation-related anecdotes I have mentioned in other comments, for the sake of elaborating on that point:
In one German-to-English project, I was sharp enough to note that there was one time where “Beachten Sie, dass” meant not “note that” but “ensure that”.
In a German-to-English project which might have been the same one, the topic was instructions for fitness equipment. One of them was a treadmill, and the instructions for that included a mention that it displays how many calories a person has “consumed” during a session with it. I say “consumed” in inverted commas because the word that was used for that in the original was “verbraucht”, and “verbrauchen” is indeed the usual German word for “consume”. And even though I originally translated it as “consume”, I eventually realised this: “Hey, wait a minute! Normally it’s like, to ‘consume’ calories means to eat food and thereby gain weight. But that’s the complete opposite of losing them like what’s supposed to happen during exercise sessions on a treadmill!” The solution was to change “consume” to “burn”. Now no-one can make any frivolous claims that I’m not smart, or “have my eyes closed” at the wrong time.
Also in that fitness equipment instructions project I saw “Sicherheitsriemen” in the original, and its only sensible English meaning is “safety belt”. Fair enough – it’s just that, when I was still learning German back at school, I learned that “safety belt” in German was “Sicherheitsgurt”. It really is like there is an unspoken rule that a safety belt in a car – or, as it’s more commonly known, a “seat belt” – but if you’re talking about any other kind of safety belt it’s “Sicherheitsriemen” even though the German word for “safety” / “security” is there in both terms.
There was a French-to-English translation project I did recently which included this in the original: “Au niveau des structures françaises, le nombre d’heures de formation effectuées s’élève à 1881 heures pour 111 stagiaires”. I was able to comprehend that, in this case “s’élève à 1881 heures pour 111 stagiaires” meant “increased to 1881 hours” but totalled 1881 hours”
I’m currently doing translations of German adverts of hotels into English, in which I’ve seen this in the original: “beschwingt aus den Federn”. I know that a literal translation of that would be like “having jumped out of the feathers” or “having jumped out of the springs”; phrases which are ALWAYS peculiar to hear as far as I can tell. I had to look “beschwingt aus den Federn” up; I was lucky in that I found that it means “straight out of bed” i.e. “as soon as you’re out of bed”. But I see where it’s coming from: like, “straight out of the feathers that you’re lying in as you’re in bed” (or maybe it’s “straight off of the springs [of the bed’s mattress]”, I don’t know. Actually – and this is a true story – I thought of “straight off of the springs” before I thought of “straight out of the feathers”. These are the two things that I claim have shaped my thinking such that that was the case; 1) I have translated technical materials on the odd occasion, and technical materials do have springs in them, don’t they?; 2) The duvet of my bed isn’t stuffed with feathers – it contains a thick cotton lining – so no wonder my mind was delayed stumbling across the “straight out of the feathers” phrase in connection with this project.
In one French-to-English translation project I did recently, I had to note that “Produits de Confort” meant “amenity products” rather then “comfort products”.
If everything I’ve just said explains or gives credence to anything, it’s that language is indeed an art, with translation being a more “esoteric” side of it. That said, however, it is not an understatement that language influences our very society in fundamental ways – are you sure that you’ve never felt “so confused yet so alive”, a quote taken from the song Descend by Feeder? You could say that, in a way, translation is like theology; and that what distinguishes a great translator from a merely “good” one is a resilient commitment to pursuing knowledge of that which, if not unknowable, is just not flat fact or fact in absolute terms. It’s probably not too far from pretending that something doesn’t make sense, or simply believing that it does despite all the evidence and arguments suggesting that it just doesn’t.
If you’re serious about translating properly: sometimes arriving at the real truth depends on knowledge of expressions which are explicitly known by relatively few rather than the hoi polloi. Question: do you know what a “pineapple check” is? Hint: it has something to do with what I do as a professional translator even if it is by no means commonplace; but Slimen Zougari, if you’re reading this, I’m about to outline a practice I do in my work I know I’ve already mentioned to you in Facebook chat, so you might not need to read the next paragraph, which explains it all…
The explanation of what a “pineapple check” is: when I start a new translation project, if the original file is a Word file I always choose to duplicate it and write the English translation over the text of the original; that way I can be sure that the client won’t bring up any formatting issues. Anyway, when I want to stop my work temporarily on a project with which I do this, I type in the word “pineapple” at the point where it stops being English and becomes French or German – the remainder of the text which is yet to be translated. A word which clearly has nothing to do with the subject matter of the document I am translating; this will be indisputable if I’m translating, say, a lease contract or a technical manual. I do this because I use it as a kind of “bookmark word”: when I come back to it I can just use the Find and Replace feature (CTRL + F) to look for “pineapple” without having to search manually for the point where the text stops being English and becomes French or German. I thought that was a smart idea. But I do remember that once, after I had submitted an otherwise satisfactory project, the project manager for it wrote back to me asking why the word “pineapple” appeared in the document.
So now do you know what a “pineapple check” is?
Oh, go on. Have a guess.
That’s right, it’s making sure that the word “pineapple”, having been used like this in the translated document, doesn’t appear anywhere in it just before I send it off. So how would this expression be translated / rendered in another language (“accurately”, of course)?
And maybe you know what “dack” is, for example – that word is defined in my comment dated 14th November 2012. When it comes to my translation work, it’s comforting to know that I have a good memory in this regard.