MY NEW MOTTO WITH MY PROFESSIONAL TRANSLATOR BLOGS: KEEP CALM AND READ AND WRITE ON (WITH ENOUGH CARE)

In this blog, one of the things I aim to do is to be a bit more open about my priorities and attitudes as a professional translator (although you could say that’s something I should be trying to do in all my blogs). I make no secret of wanting to rise higher in the translation industry – for the purpose of getting more money than anything else, to be perfectly honest. Oh, and personal pride. And I can see that this is why I make such an effort to style myself so grandly in my marketing wherever possible – certainly in the blogs I write (at this time I have like 180,000 words’ worth of blog comments just like this – boo-ya!).

But that doesn’t mean I outright prefer not to share in the thoughts of beginner professional translators, as if I were instead effectively inclined to mock them. No, I’m all for encouraging them as long as they have some intellectual value worthy of open appreciation. You see, I have been keeping a record of a comment posted on the translator forum ProZ with the title “Translation for expression ‘bring it in’”, and I got to thinking that it’s likely that someone starting out as a professional translator would write a similar comment as one of the first comments they would write in order to promote themselves – display their interest and capacity for independent thought and creativity on the subject of language much as I do (even though, as important as that is, there’s a lot more to it than that, of course). Now, the people in charge of ProZ, being who they are, have since taken the comment down for reasons I won’t discuss here, but I can still post a screenshot of a record of it, with all its content, right here.

The thing is, my discovery and reading of this comment got me wondering just exactly how I would translate certain common English words, phrases and sentence structures which… well, just are what they are into French and / or German. Here I have taken time out from writing about facts and phenomena related to language and linguistics and the whole practice of it all which even a language professional like myself could probably only learn the hard way, to provide some fine examples of this with their accompanying speculation:
• Everyone’s heard of the phrase “Whatever!” on its own in English – I actually know that the Germans say “wie o immer!” to convey the same idea (having heard this directly from a native German speaker, so don’t bother trying to dispute it), but I don’t know of an equivalent expression in French. I have toyed with the idea of saying “quel que soit” to indicate it in French – even though French is not my mother tongue, AND much as I find it believable it’s not particularly likely that anyone would mistakenly think that “quel que soit” is an expression which does in fact already exist in actual French (when used in isolation). Of course, I realise that the original English version can only be an abbreviated version of something indefinite along the lines of “Yes, yes… whatever you say – it just doesn’t matter that much to me really / you’re full of rubbish! Jog on!” But the focus here is supposed to be all about the possible provision of “official” translations of the single word “Whatever” used in this sense.
• Example two: imagine, just for a moment, that I was expected to translate “I guess I hadn’t thought of that” into French and German. This sentence is just “I hadn’t thought of that” with the deliberate implication of a certain piece of information in connection with it; nothing more, nothing less, and all very simple and straightforward. But I can consider it likely that even a beginner professional translator would soon think, “Hey, maybe it’s best that I don’t insist on using ‘deviner’ / ‘erraten’ in my translation of this phrase into French and German” – “deviner” and “erraten” being the French and German words for “guess”. Myself, I would use “seem” i.e. “It seems I hadn’t thought of that (French: “Il semblerait [lit. “it would seem”] que je n’avais pas pensé de cela [lit. “that I hadn’t thought of that”]”; German: Es scheint aus dass ich von das nicht gedacht habe.”
• Finishing a sentence with “I’m afraid”: I know what the word “afraid” means – so why is the expression “I’m afraid” at the end of sentences in English used the way it is? Is it like, “I’m afraid [or maybe a better word would be “reluctant”?] to declare openly that I just can’t suggest anything better”? Or “I’m afraid / reluctant to declare openly that I can’t explain the sense behind this matter”? Or “I’m afraid / reluctant to declare openly that however you personally feel about this matter just doesn’t matter”?
• In English, there exists certain popular idiomatic expressions like “it’s raining cats and dogs”, which can (but by no means always) definitely sound peculiar to a French / German speaker if translated literally. Based on past experience, I suppose you get them in just about all languages, not that I could provide a coherent explanation why in all cases. Maybe I should just accept that there’s not necessarily an “official” equivalent of all these idioms in French or German, or indeed any other language. But what’s so bad about that really?
• I looked up the French and German words for “ceasefire” as part of this, getting “cessez-le-feu” for French and “Waffenstillstand” (lit. “weapons standstill”) for German. But if we took the made-up word “ceasedrink” (made up by me) based on that – meaning, you’ve guessed it, a period of strictly drinking no alcohol ???? – would this absolutely be “cessez-le-boire” in French and “Drinkstillstand” (lit. “drink standstill”) in German? And I know that in French there exists the word “alunir”, which means “to land on the moon” in the same way that “atterrir” is supposed to mean “to land on earth”, or “touch down” (after a flight), depending on the context.
• In English, “quack” is both the sound a duck makes and an informal, or rather, derogatory, term for a person who calls himself / herself a medical professional who doesn’t deserve as much credit as they love to think and propagate, due to their logic being flawed and / or because it’s evident to their peers, if not themselves, that they are out of their depth. You get the idea. But in French, ducks go “coin-coin”, while in German it’s “Quak-Quak”. At the end of the day, I just don’t buy the idea of the French or the Germans using an animal noise to designate a questionably qualified medical professional, and I don’t think you do either (by the way, the word “toubib” exists in French, and “coin” in French means “corner” in English).
• What do you think would be the best standard operating procedure to adopt when you’re supposed to translate, say, Cockney Rhyming Slang into French or German, “ma vielle porcelaine” / “mein altes Porzellan”? Putting that humorous comment aside, probably not literally, I’ll be bound. I dare suggest that a lot of people would choose to use generic slang in the language translated into on each occasion.
• I probably shouldn’t have included this one but I went ahead with it anyway. While I’m happy to confirm that the “proper” French and German equivalent expressions of the expression “fuck you” are “baise-toi” and “fick dich” respectively, right now I just thought: how would “What the fuck?” be translated into French and German if not literally? Surely “Quoi la baise?” and “Was des Fickens?” (having decided on the genitive with the “infinitive action concept noun” “Ficken” rather than the nominative with the noun version of “fuck” in the sense of “fancy a fuck?” in the case of German) would be rejected as being excessively literal, so to speak? Just for your information, I did a bit a research and, from what I’ve seen, the “proper” French expression of “What the fuck?” is “Quel putain” (lit. “What whore?”… don’t ask me), while the “proper” German of it is a bit less vulgar: “Was zum Teufel”, which translates loosely as “What the devil?”

And that’s how I roll. Deal with it.