Well, recently I was involved in a very big multilingual transcription project – basically I
wrote down English translation of the content of some interviews in German (recorded in
MP4 video format). This is not the kind of work I usually do – while I am proud of the final
output, it was a very long slog. I guess I need to give my whole approach to multilingual
transcription work some urgent serious review – that’s why I watched a couple of videos on
interpretation technique on YouTube recently, looking for inspiration. If I’m serious, they
won’t be the last.
At this stage, though, I can at least be coherent as to the reasons why my confidence was
somewhat undermined from the start. Yes, I have a solid knowledge of German and a wide
vocabulary, and wasn’t really worried about hearing words I had never heard of before; right
in front of my computer, it’s so easy just to Google them, and my spelling skills in German,
as well as my mother tongue English (and also French), are pretty much impeccable. But
being realistic I fully expected that – in addition to possible audio problems in the files I was
expected to view – I would hear those involved in these German language interviews
skipping syllables in German, and deviating pronunciation on the occasional word, and what
people in the transcription industry call “false starts” in verbal communication (especially if
they are native speakers, and it was native German speakers who were being interviewed, if
by a non-native German speaker!). In short, I fully gathered from the start that the possibility
of confusion and frustration would be very high as a result of these things. After all, when I
was still doing foreign language listening exercises at school, I was mostly expected to only
really try to make out specific information which would allow me to answer, basically,
“Which of these descriptions/statements is the right one with this recording, and which one is
the right one with that recording?” In professional work such as this, it’s all you can do to be
prepared for anything communicated in spoken language which is not your mother tongue.
Like I already said, when I agreed to do this work I fully expected skipped syllables,
deviating pronunciation and false starts – and it’s not like I had the possibility of asking the
speakers to reword things, or just ask them questions for the sake of helping to improve my
own understanding. And sometimes, in German or in any language, there are expressions
which sound similar and which as such can leave you thrown off track if your cognitive skills
for spoken words in that language are just not quite enhanced enough. Certainly in my case, I
frequently felt a need to replay individual bits – whether to make sure I had actually picked
up every word or just to verify that what I thought I had heard really was as such. In the
videos I transcribed in the particular work I am talking about here I witnessed the
interviewees seemingly trying to “more or less” organise their thoughts as they gave some
sort of response to the questions they were asked – and I accepted it as something that would
frustrate me, and it did. But it consumes a lot of time writing down everything you are able to
make out (having played it multiple times) verbatim before you can start to answer the
question: “Just exactly what would be the best way to translate this coherently?” And at the
beginning of this work I did, I acknowledged that sometimes even a single word in a sentence
can conspicuously change its meaning, especially if it’s an adverb, like “already” or
“additionally”. Like I said, I didn’t want to miss anything out.
But I never really agreed that I would have been granted much latitude with this work when it
was professional work and it’s not my place to say how important it is, and by that I was
doing all I could to limit the need for guesswork – even if I was ready to be inventive – and
that’s why the work I did took longer than it should have. Which brings me to this point:
Don’t ask me why, but there have been times when I have watched English-language films I
have bought on DVD in their French and German dub versions, or at least part of them, just
out of interest. I see what I can make out – having already learned by heart what the
characters say verbatim at a given point, and sometimes differences in wording just strike me.
Not only does it get my interest, I wonder if it really is better that way in the case of the
foreign language in question. Maybe I should learn from this – not be too focused on
capturing every single word in the original material when I do multilingual transcription work
and instead just settle for a coherent sentence which, while the wording might be quite
different, indisputably captures the intended message of the original, including style and tone.
Still, when it comes to films in particular, it would seem that native speakers can insist on
changing the wording to an extent where it’s as if they want to represent something in an entirely
different way. Here’s an example: I don’t know about you but I have seen The Bourne
Identity, the film starring Matt Damon, the French title of which, apparently, is “La Mémoire
dans la Peau” – which translates literally as “The Memory in The Skin”. Now, whether or not
you have seen it, I fully imagine that this phrase would likely confuse you – I have included a
link to the scene in the film (available on YouTube) which should help you to understand
this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeGDBR0Ej_0 You see the details for a bank
account for Jason Bourne at 1:43, after the thing, is retrieved from his hip – for some reason
the film title in the French version does not mention Bourne’s name in any way, even though
he’s the main character and the leading “good guy”, no less… just that the whole film is
indeed about him, a man suffering from amnesia trying to rediscover who he is while being
hunted down by the American secret services. What’s wrong with “L’Identité de Bourne”?
Maybe it’s because, as we watch the film, we see that “Bourne” himself goes by various
identities (under the different passports he eventually finds in a later scene, which he gained
during his work as an American secret agent), when his actual real name – as seen at the end
of the film, when Pamela Landy tells him it during a phone call he has with her – is David
Webb.