This is my tenth year of doing professional translation, and yet I will admit that there are occasions where I am compelled to ask my clients for their opinions about certain aspects about the work I do for them. I don’t do it without a good reason. And I realise damn well that asking rhetorical questions about a subject on which you are no authority, is not a good idea – I think of Dekay on Brexit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF7odXxEbmw
HOW I WOULD ANSWER THE (IMAGINARY) QUESTION “HOW DO I TRANSLATE?”
Some days ago I posted a tweet about the little-known language Mapudungun (it is listed in Ethnologue), including a link to a webpage which includes a list of quotes which have been translated from English into Mapudungun for use in the PC game Civilisation VI, for Mapudungun is the language used in that game by one of the people you can play as (in his spoken dialogue, at least). Well, the same game includes quotes from many other real-life people throughout history which are in many languages other than English; they include languages which, unlike Mapudungun, you can translate using Google Translate. For example, I have looked at some of the things that Alexander the Great (the leader of Macedon) says by taking his quotes in Ancient Greek and having them translated into English using Google Translate – yes, Google Translate’s translate from Greek option allows you to translate from Ancient Greek just like modern Greek – even though the game already provides English translations of them. Now… I don’t know how true it is for all the other languages in the game, but the English versions of these Ancient Greek quotes, that are listed on Alexander’s page on that site, differ considerably from the English versions obtained when you run the Ancient Greek quotes through Google Translate. It’s not just a case of deciding on a clearly different word or alternative sentence structure here and there; you actually need to weigh the translations that Google Translate provides against the English translations of the Ancient Greek quotes that are listed in the log of Civ 6 and apply considerable attention and initiative to see the similarities / differences. http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Alexander_(Civ6)
So what does this mean to me? Well, I would hate to see my own credibility as a professional translator undermined on the basis of the fact that, when I’m at work, I rarely seek to write sentences which are so different yet so loyal to the message of the original. So maybe you’re wondering how I would answer the (imaginary) question “How do you translate?” Could I ever be sure of writing a translation of anything, which I know that no-one could end up with misled conceptions about purely as a result of their own imagination (which may well be unconscious!)?
I would say that I feel most confident when I am writing in a way where people would find it very hard to impugn or embellish the facts that are supposed to be understood from the original – in a plain and matter-of-fact manner, I think. I mean, it’s not uncommon for me to re-go over what I’ve written multiple times if I am but left guessing as to the underlying details of the meaning of the content of the message in places however sure I can be of the correctness of what I have written. What I have written may reflect the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth but if I don’t actually understand the system behind the content of the subject matter / how it works in actual practice, then I know I should try harder to avert misinterpretations / false conclusions (with myself or the future reader) and this can frustrate me. You could say that I know better than to get complacent if it were pointed out to me that I had translated a sentence better than I realised.
At this stage, I will assert this: I am against attempts to draw attention to individual words over others as if I wanted those words in particular to be remembered by the reader (especially if I didn’t actually understand why!).