I have been getting notably few offers of translation and/or multilingual proofreading work at this time of year, probably as a result of so many people (including those in the many translation agencies that I have done work for) going on summer holiday, so I decided that I had nothing to lose by entering this translation contest I came across on ProZ. As those who know me best will confirm, ProZ is a website dedicated to the professional translation community with which I’ve had an account for many years, and I have occasionally accepted and completed jobs through them. To this day I continue to receive notifications of new offers of work, and “people looking for new linguists”, on ProZ, and it has a forum where members can exchange their thoughts in their efforts to advance (or safeguard, as the case may be) their careers as professional linguists.
Anyway, when I received an automated email from ProZ telling me about a “translation contest” in recent days, it got my interest. Not least because I accepted it as a chance to truly participate in the translation community, knowing that it would serve as proof that I’m ready to work not just in isolation. After all, when you’re an entrepreneur, isn’t your marketing all up to you at the end of the day? And as much as I write articles and post tweets about what I do/the field in which I work, there’s always a voice telling me that that is “just the beginning”. And the subject of this article seems like something worth sharing in networking efforts and inviting chat about on social media and the like.
When I initially registered onto this contest, I was actually originally disappointed for a moment: I thought it would be the perfect place for me to share the work behind this article I wrote many months back: https://www.georgetrailtranslator.co.uk/what-is-literal-translation-good-for-this/ Or something like that. But no, I was merely invited to provide my own original translation of a pre-set French text of just over 300 words – and I liked it all the same. Remember: me writing this article about it was no accident. So anyway, the text I was expected to translated was as follows:
“Des livres, rien que des livres. Alignés sur les étagères. Empilés au sol. Entassés sur le moindre coin de table. Toutes les pièces en regorgent. A peine la place de circuler. C’est ici, dans cet appartement bourgeois du 16e arrondissement de Paris, que Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat a installé son bureau. Ici qu’il travaille face à son ordinateur, douze à quatorze heures par jour, à lire, traduire et préfacer les livres des autres et à écrire les siens. Le soir, il n’a qu’à traverser la rue pour rentrer chez lui. “Ma vie sociale est réduite au minimum”, reconnaît-il.
A bientôt 50 ans, Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat est l’un des traducteurs français les plus demandés.[…]
Polyglotte ? Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat balaie le qualificatif d’un revers de main. Il ne parle aucune des langues qu’il traduit. “Même en anglais, je suis incapable de dire deux mots, assure-t-il. A part le latin et le grec, je n’ai jamais appris aucune langue étrangère. La plupart de mes contrats, je les ai signés sans connaître le moins du monde la langue que j’allais traduire. Il suffit qu’un éditeur me convainque de l’intérêt d’un livre pour que j’accepte de relever le défi. Vous ne pouvez pas imaginer dans quel état de tension je suis quand je me mets à travailler sur un texte auquel je ne comprends rien…”[…]
Sa méthode est toujours la même : allergique aux grammaires, il préfère s’”immerger” dans des dictionnaires et des livres en édition bilingue. Généralement, il ne lit pas à l’avance l’ouvrage qu’il doit traduire : ” C’est indispensable pour garder une forme de spontanéité dans la traduction.” Seul principe, il commence par traduire la fin : “J’ai une telle angoisse de la mort que je préfère me débarrasser de la fin dès le début”, explique-t-il. […] Ce “besoin vital de (s’)exiler dans la langue des autres”, il dit l’éprouver depuis toujours.”
When I started and read the first words to be translated, I really didn’t know what to expect. Could these words have been taken from a piece of fiction? Maybe it was part of a marketing article, or something out of a specific-interest magazine or something like that? Eventually I realised that it was about a man called Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, whom I’d never heard of before; but, wow, I looked him up on Google and found out that he is a living professional translator and writer just like me! And when he revealed his inability to converse in any other language besides his mother tongue (French), this only made me intrigued about him. Anyway, here’s my own English translation of this text, followed by comments about it I just had to include as part of this article:
“Just books. All there is to see is books. Books lined up on the shelves. Piles of books on the floor. And books piled up at the corner of the table. All the rooms are full of them. They leave barely enough space to move around in. It was here, in this bourgeois apartment in the 16th district of Paris, that Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat settled his office. And this is where he works, in front of his computer, for twelve to fourteen hours a day, reading, translating, prefacing the books of others and writing his own. In the evening, he only needs to cross the street to go back home. “My social life is but minimal”, he recounts.
Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, who will turn 50 soon, is one of France’s translators most in demand. […]
Could we call Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat a polyglot? Well, this question is something he, apparently, deals with very nonchalantly. He does not speak any of the languages that he translates. “Even English, I can barely say a couple of words,” he says. “Apart from Latin and Greek, I have never learned any foreign language. Most of my contracts, I signed them without knowing anything at all about the language that I was going to translate. For me it’s enough for an editor to convince me of the interest people have in a book, for me to accept the challenge. You can’t imagine the kind of tension I feel when I get to work on a text I know nothing about…” […]
His method is always the same: being allergic to the rules of grammar, he prefers to “immerse himself” in dictionaries and bilingual edition books. Generally he doesn’t read a work that he is expected to translate in advance: “It is essential to maintain a form of spontaneity when translating.” The only principle is that it starts with the translation of the end: “I’m so afraid of death that I prefer to deal with the end at the very beginning,” he explains. […] He talks of a “vital need to exile himself in the language of others,” saying that it is something that he has always felt.”
I just had to include these comments – basically, I found myself wondering whether the people who created this contest knowingly imagined that it would be likely that “this bit or that expression” would be translated in a particular way which is “just not optimal” – a way that’s probably too literal. They probably had measures in place from the start for determining if machine translation was used – if that were the case, I couldn’t provide any details of these, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. I know I weighed how I translated this against this possibility. And now, the comments:
“Entassés sur le moindre coin de table” – The reason I put “And books piled up at the corner of the table” for this is this argument that you couldn’t have stopped me from reflecting on in my head: “How does a table [of any regular shape] have a ‘smallest’ corner, exactly?” Maybe they were getting at the corner of the table that receives the least attention (for want of a better expression)? I.e. for what takes place (forgive the over-generalisation) there.
I remember realising that, as I was translating the very first bit, about the books, while I did start off writing in the present tense I knew even back then that it might be better to change it to the imperfect past later depending on what I eventually realised the material was actually about. But no, it was definitively to be the present tense. Fine.
“arrondissement de Paris” – I was tempted to leave “arrondissement” untranslated while knowingly wondering if “district” would have been more appropriate. Either way, Google Translate also suggested “borough” and “precinct”. I must admit that, in past French-to-English translation jobs, I just wrote “arrondissement” for this word/concept and italicised it.
“Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat a installé son bureau”: yes, “installer” in French can mean “install” in English – it’s no faux ami – but nevertheless, here I translated “installé” as “settled” rather than “installed” – not literal. I wouldn’t be surprised if whoever started this contest was ready from the outset to penalise anyone for translating it as “installed”.
I remember Googling this Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat just to see if he was a living person or dead (a convenience which just wasn’t available in the not-too-distant past!). If he was dead, was he a renowned author or something? What? But no, as I said, he is a living professional translator/author to this day. He was born in 1958 and he’s still at it; all credit to him. Who knows? He may even have a ProZ account (or maybe one with TranslatorsCafe, Traduguide etc.) just like me! That said, it does beg the question of how the creators of the contest found out about this man.
“‘Ma vie sociale est réduite au minimum’, reconnaît-il.” – For this I put “‘My social life is but minimal’, he recounts.” You may have already predicted (correctly) that I normally translate “reconnaître” as “recognise”, but then that shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone who speaks French if you ask me. What matters is that it should be evident that I actually had my brain switched on during this task, and that this is just another piece of evidence proving that.
“l’un des traducteurs français les plus demandés.” – On a rare occasion I translated “traducteurs français” as “France’s translators”, not “French translators”. I myself am a French translator in a sense. But it depends on how you view it.
“allergique aux grammaires” – For this I put “allergic to the rules of grammar”, not just “allergic to grammar”. Of course, the word “allergic” shouldn’t be taken at face value, but that’s how it was in the original as well and it just didn’t seem right to try thinking of anything else. Should I have known better?
Final comment: say what you want but personally, but based on what I’d learned about this man in the final paragraph, I felt it was an honour to write about someone with this kind of linguistic creativity, who is this willing to try things in spite of where his knowledge of aspects of language are lacking. Like me. Just saying.